What matters to us is that Henk is up against two more-experienced software competitors: Andromeda owner Robert Stein (Toby Jones), who’s already secured the PC rights to Tetris, and the repugnant father-son combo who run Mirrorsoft, Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his nepotistic No. Turns out, the contract side of things is a lot more complicated than he (or we) can keep up with, and it may take a business major to untangle all the legal back-and-forth. It’s an unconventional and slightly clunky choice to introduce our hero in an investment meeting, but Baird wants us to like the little guy he dubs “Player 1,” and Egerton has the affability to deliver key exposition while trying to convince the bank to back his vision.įrom the moment Henk discovers Tetris at a sales conference, he’s smitten, buying a license to release the game in Japan - or so he thinks. For example, he gamely presents new characters and locations using retro-style 8-bit title screens, and later on, during the climactic car chase, the screen pixelates at points, as if we’ve crossed over into an arcade session of Spy Hunter.įor the story to work, we have to care about the characters, so producer Matthew Vaughn (whose flashy fingerprints we can feel all over this film) enlists “Kingsman” star Taron Egerton to play Dutch-Indonesian entrepreneur Henk Rogers, a Japan-based family man who puts his life savings into Tetris. Slightly tamer here than in his earlier indie projects (like truth-in-advertising “Filth”), Baird brings real-world insights and highly original stylistic ideas to the table. That detail, plus the fact everything is happening just a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, adds an unexpected political dimension to the negotiations, which has special appeal for director Jon S.

Tetris game with little man game