.

I’m not sure what it was about the story of Henk Rogers, the man who got the rights to license and distribute the computer game Tetris around the world, that they thought would make a good movie. It certainly wasn’t the contract negotiations or the legal arrangements and I don’t think it can have been his comfortable home situation or the large amount the time he evidently spent in airport lounges. I’m guessing instead it was the accusations of spying, the fist fights, the car chases, the battling corrupt media moguls and the constant out manoeuvring of mean and threatening KGB agents. Essentially then none of the truth and all potential for massive conjecture and wild elaboration.

To be fair, it may be that some of political pressure not to release the USSR designed game to UK, American and Japanese representatives was there in real life and I am sure that dealing with Russian security forces was a genuinely little intimidating but there is no way of getting past the fact that this a film where the fairly dry events that actually took place have been very heavily Hollywoodised.

In the end though, none of this matters if they have managed to make a decent film out of it. It would have been more impressive if they’d been able to keep things real and still provide a strong narrative like they did with The Social Network, but taken on its own merits Tetris is a lot of fun.

There has been some controversy about Welsh/English Taron Egerton playing the Dutch/Indonesian Henk Rogers but looking at photos of Rogers I’m thinking that if they were worried about authenticity they should have got Billy Bob Thornton.

Egerton, nationality notwithstanding, is perfect for the part. He has exactly the right level of humility and bolshy determination for the way the man is presented here, the same as he has played in several of his previous roles. That said, this still shows his range and is for sure another step on his way to some massive film franchise, be that Bond or something else. This isn’t his audition for 007 though, with the Cold War tension. He is not playing that kind of character; he’s more James Stewart than James Bond. In terms of the Russian setting, five years ago this might have felt dated but right now there is quite the appetite for seeing an unlikely everyman standing up to outdated communist bullying. This in itself might have been a reason for making the movie. This is the Soviet Union on the brink of Glasnost and figures like Gorbachev actually come out of it really well. It is the small minded men, clinging to power through psychotic oppressive and misguided arrogant patriotism that are made to look foolish here and while it is awful that one of these nut jobs is back in power again, his kind does make a great enemy in a way that hasn’t been the case since Connery took off the tux.

The rest of the cast are good too. Most of them are unknown apart from Toby Jones and Roger Allam who is familiar himself but unrecognisable as Robert Maxwell. A shout out also has to go to Anthony Boyle, who is odious as Kevin Maxwell, and Nikita Efremov as Alexey Pajitnov – the man who actually designed that addictive little blocking game we all know in the first place. Women are a bit sidelined in the film but Sofya Lebedeva does well, making her character more than the Agent Honeypot she might have been on the page, or indeed in any pre-Brosnan Bond movie.

I have to mention the soundtrack as well, which masterfully mixes in the famous Tetris theme to actually make it music. In fact this is a perfect example of what the whole film does, realistic or not; it takes something that is familiar and even a bit annoying and cheap in previous formats and makes it really engaging again. In fact this is probably Hollywoodisation coming full circle and working at its absolute best. It stacks up.