A teenage girl named Sarah (Isabelle Allen) gets sucked into her favorite video game, a sci-fi beat ‘em up called Max Cloud. She takes the form of a lowly crew member named Jake (Elliot James Langridge) and must help the hero, Max (Scott Adkins) fight space Ninjas, repair his ship, and find a way off the hostile planet of Heinous. Naturally, if Sarah dies in the video game, she’ll die for real, so she has her friend Cowboy (Franz Drameh) play as her character and make it all the way to the final level so she can find a way home.
The obvious inspiration for Max Cloud was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It does the same exact “sucked into a video game” set-up, except on a much cheaper budget. The obvious difference is that this video game is a space adventure, which comes with a certain amount of amusing potential. It doesn’t work nearly as well as Jumanji, but at least it offers Adkins an opportunity to flex is comedic chops a bit.
Adkins seems to be having fun as the hopelessly square and macho hero. His posturing is especially amusing during the fight scenes as his movements, punches, and kicks look like your typical 16-Bit character. Some of the fights are highlighted by occasional bits of funny gore, which look about on par with your average ‘90s side scroller. They aren’t particularly great or anything, but at least the editing and choreography is solid for the most part.
Max Cloud had a modicum amount of potential, but it ultimately shoots its wad early on and never is able to repeat its early success. The big problem is the character of Jake. There really isn’t a whole lot to him, and his character is too thinly written to make you root for him. Whereas Jumaji did a great job at making you feel like the teenage characters were trapped in their video game avatars’ bodies, here, Jake just sort of looks and acts like your typical callow sidekick. The stuff with Cowboy playing the video game and being guided by Sarah’s disembodied voice is also a little goofy and doesn’t quite land like it should.
If you’re a fan of Adkins, Max Cloud is worth a look if only to see him using his physical skills and implementing them into an atypical vehicle. He certainly gets to show a little more range here than he has in the past. It’s just a shame that the flimsy script never really exploits the concept to its fullest potential. Maybe if they scrapped the whole video game scenario and just made it a pure ‘90s throwback, it might’ve worked. (The only really amusing video game segment is the final boss level, where things switch over to a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game.) As it is, Max Coud is a near-miss.
AKA: The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud.
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