Beta Test (2016) | Film Review

I’ve been waiting a long time for a really good video game movie. Preferably, I’d love one based on an actual intellectual property, but I’d settle for one that merely centers on the theme of video games. I’m so passionate about getting one that I even wrote an editorial describing what I believe it takes to make a good video game movie. Unfortunately, Nicholas Gyeney – the writer/director of “Beta Test” – must have missed my article. While it has an interesting premise that grabbed my attention early on, the story turned into murky complexity and ultimately couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to be taken seriously.

At its core, the story is really rather silly, but for some reason its introduction worked for me. Max Troy (Larenz Tate) is an expert gamer who is beta testing a brand new game for one of the largest video game companies around. What he comes to realize is that he’s not merely playing a game, the actions that he makes on-screen are being mirrored in the real world. When he controls his avatar in the game, he is actually controlling the movements of a man named Orson Creed (Manu Bennett), a former employee of the very company who made the game he is playing. Max is blackmailed to complete various “missions” via Creed, including breaking into a bank’s safe deposit box and getting involved in a school shooting. Max decides to take matter into his own hands and turn the tables on the company, who of course has an evil plot to take over the city.

While the premise showed a lot of promise, the final act turned into a complete mess. To be perfectly honest, I would have trouble explaining the ending. It’s too bad, because “Beta Test” had a lot of potential, yet sadly it falls in the usual pit of unsatisfying video game movies that makes me pessimistic about the future of this genre of films.

Most of the performances in the movie are serviceable, but not spectacular. It’s one of those collaborations that, for lack of a better way to explain, makes it feel like an independent film. It did have one stand-out in Manu Bennett, who plays Orson Creed. He’s one of the reasons that the original premise made me sit up and take notice. He takes it seriously, and I really appreciated the choices he made with the role. He was also a supreme bad-ass during his hand-to-hand fight sequences. Larenz Tate as Max worked better than I expected and gave the right amount of levity without being too silly. Linden Ashby, who is no stranger to video game movies with his role of Johnny Cage in “Mortal Kombat”, plays an antagonist CEO. While he comes across as very menacing, he makes the movie feel like it’s a bit of a joke to him. If video game themed movies are going to work, I believe that the actors need to own the roles instead of making them out to be anything less than serious.

One thing I appreciated about “Beta Test”, as a gamer myself, is the attention to detail when it comes to video games. Writers Nicholas Gyeney and André Kirkman used actual gamer lingo and appeared to legitimately understand gaming culture instead of sounding like all they did was a tiny bit of throw-away research. The game itself even looked like it could be something straight out of the last generation of gaming consoles. The production quality of the rest of the film, while still feeling like a lower-budgeted title, was decent enough. As I mentioned earlier, I was pleasantly surprised by the fight sequences, which were cleverly choreographed and intensely visceral (despite trying to wrap my head around how Creed’s glasses stayed on the entire time).

To sum up, “Beta Test” has some genuinely fresh ideas that simply don’t satisfy in the end for either a gamer audience nor your average film buff. It starts strong and does quite a few things to move this genre of film in the right direction. Sadly, it takes just as many missteps and ultimately feels like a complicated, silly mess of a plot.