Tetris (2023)

Tetris arrives as a brisk corporate thriller about intellectual property, which is a sentence that sounds like a punishment and turns out to be mostly a pleasure. Jon S. Baird keeps the pace clipped, the period detail is applied with a trowel, and Taron Egerton sweats convincingly through a licensing war that spans Las Vegas, Tokyo, London, and a Moscow rendered in Glasgow. The film understands that the Cold War makes an excellent backdrop for men in suits arguing about contracts. It is not, on the evidence, much interested in anything else.

The casting has a genuine internationalism to it. Japanese, Russian, and Korean-descended performers fill roles that map onto the story's actual geography, which reads as sensible rather than engineered. Sofia Lebedeva's Sasha is competent and gets to turn the tables in the final reel, though the film treats her as a plot mechanism and never bothers to make an argument about her. The Maxwells snarl about money, and Trifonov snarls about money, and the film invites us to hiss at them. Then Nintendo wins, the deal closes, and the capitalists are vindicated by the closing credits. A film cannot eat the rich while handing them the Game Boy rights.

There is a passing mention of Estonia agitating for independence, and a general hum of Soviet menace, but the sermon never arrives. Nobody lectures us about anything. The result is a film with almost no cultural agenda to speak of, a relic of an older kind of studio entertainment, and for that it deserves a small, weary nod of respect.