Being a Gen-X guy, I'm certainly not the target audience for this kind of film. I've played computer and video games since 1987 but this film seems more squarely aimed at easily impressed 15-25 year-old headset-wearing Twitch gamers who haven't already seen THEY LIVE, READY PLAYER ONE, THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE LAST ACTION HERO, or WRECK IT RALPH already. It also feels like the screenplay was penned the DNC itself with a generous helping of annoying wokeness sprinkled in after tossing in the scripts from all those films into a blender.

A cute central idea of a video game NPC acquiring sentience quickly gets derailed by not spending enough time building a believable universe and focusing the movie heavily on the "real world" characters reacting to him. The real world does not feel significantly contrasted from the fake one to the degree of THE LAST ACTION HERO with characters behaving just as cartoonishly and self-righteously in both worlds. For a film with so much incidental violence, it all feels extremely watered down with the video game centered heavily around bank robbery, reminding me of those old Spider-man cartoons. That's probably as "hardcore" of a crime they could base the plot of the game around without getting too close to authentic Grand Theft Auto territory of nonstop debauchery and losing the PG-13 rating. There is, however, plenty of naughty language and CGI explosions to compensate, if that's your thing.

The film contains its share of stunning visuals, so over-rendered that they begin to lose all meaning, laced with so much CGI that it renders any of the real-world stunt work unimpressive. The viewer will come to believe that everything they're watching is pretty much just CGI, as a lot of it is pretty obvious. A few show-stopping moments like a key face replacement late in the film, come off as comically poor considering the near-limitless resources at their disposal. It's really the lack of any thrills, character or universe consistency, tension, or originality that just makes this speedy film (full of lots of fast-talks blazing through exposition) unfortunately dull and empty.

This will likely be another one of those polarizing films that will develop an ardent cult following due to political tribalism. On its merits, this film squanders a good idea and doesn't bring us anything new. It has some pretty visuals and moves quickly enough, but for those of us who fall outside its target demo, that's about it.