In the realm of capitalism, if you can do it, chances are you can make money off of it. That’s why you can make money from doing everything from playing board games, tossing a pig skin, or PvP Counter-Strike competitions. Generations with adult money right now are the ones who first touched an Atari or a Famicom, who likely still rock a controller in their spare time and have raised a new generation on Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox and/or PC. It makes sense, then, that in the world of sports cinema where stories range from underdog competitors (Rocky; The Mighty Ducks) to athletes in their last days (For the Love of the Game) to the call of the game itself (Field of Dreams), an esports-driven tale would emerge. Answering that call is director Dickson Leung Kwok-Fai (Yum Investigation) with his latest project, Good Game, an underdog sports dramedy having its world premiere in the Selection 2025 section of Fantasia International Film Festival 2025. With a mix of sports tropes and a cast of notable Hong Kong stars, Good Game uses the visual language of video games to convey how competition, a shared goal, can bring people together and provide the salve many seek for loneliness and purpose.
L-R: Lo Kwan Lam as Octo, Andrew Lam as Tightie, Will Or as Bond, and Yanny Chan as Fay in GOOD GAME. Photo courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival.
Faced with rising rent and dwindling customers, internet café owner Tightie (Andrew Lam) decides to pull together a rag-tag gaming team to win a $500,000 prize. He recruits his daughter, Fay (Yanny Chan); former actor Octo (Lo Kwan Lam); and recently fired eSports pro Bond (Will Or) to his team named “Happy Hour.” While this mix of amateurs and professionals have their own reasons for competing, driving them toward the finish line, the desire to win may not be enough to snag the prize.
L-R: Ken Law as Octo’s avatar, Amy Lo as Tightie’s avatar, Ansonbean as Bond’s avatar, and Chloe So as Fay’s avatar in GOOD GAME. Photo courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival.
To be clear here, Good Game isn’t a video game movie in the vein of Mortal Kombat (1995) or The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) wherein the narrative of the film plays out through a video game setup, but more like The Wizard (1989), Grandma’s Boy (2006), or Gamer (2009) wherein the characters are shown playing a game with some kind of representation provided to show progress. For The Wizard, it was showing actual Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay alongside a progress bar representing the competitors, whereas Grandma’s Boy just showed people playing a console game. Leung actually sets up scenes with a different set of actors to replicate what the gaming characters are doing to make physical the digital elements of the game. Doing so gives the film a Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)-meets-Hardcore Henry (2015) feel as the camerawork switches between the newly-presented characters (physical avatars) who engage in a variety of weapons-based close-quarters combat. In these sequences, Leung attempts to replicate the sensation of game play through a mix of third-person and first-person display moments, often incorporating a different framerate so as to aid in visually separating the gaming world from the real world. In these segments, the characters don’t move like something you’d see in a Borderlands or Call of Duty, a specific choice that brings with it a certain intention (to be discussed below), so the avatar actors aren’t restricted to behaving as if in a game, but there are times in which crawling, shooting, or dodging does have a feel familiar to those who’ve been gaming for decades.
Good Games marks Leung’s third time in the director’s chair after Yum Investigation (2023) and The Caller (2024), but the filmmaker has been working in the industry as an assistant director since at least 2002’s My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. Of his projects, Leung was second assistant director for Infernal Affairs (2002), New Police Story (2004), and Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013), titles which meant working alongside action cinema royalty (past and present) Andy Lau, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jackie Chan, Nicholas Tse, Andy On, Stephen Chow, and Shu Qi. Viewed through this lens, Good Games is not merely a rote underdog sports story, but a convergence of perceived new media and old. Leung purposefully constructs his film to take place in two worlds, the physical and the electronic, and replaces his central cast with actors portraying their avatars. This choice does a few things, some obvious and some less so. The more obvious aspect is that by having a new set of actors as avatars, Leung is able to make the gameplay sequences more dynamic. It’s not that watching competitors battle can’t be exciting, but it’s not necessarily “cinematic” to see actors pressing keys and moving their mouse, but integrating actors into a set that’s a mix of real and digital construction does inspire audiences to lean in a bit more. It’s a translation of video game language into that of cinema, enabling the audience to engage more fully and buy-in. This also ensures that team members like Tightie and Octo are represented as active parts of the team given the presentation of their characters’ physical capabilities. More importantly (and the thing that Leung is able to accomplish here) their respective avatars — played by Amy Lo (One More Chance) and story creator Ken Ho-Ming Law (Raging Fire) — are a means of bringing that old school martial arts action through a new school framework. The costume for Law’s avatar character is very Shaw Bros. coded, as is Octo’s background, and the fighting style is a mixture of punches, kicks, and throws that evokes a more classic Hong Kong fighting style. In slight contrast, Lo’s avatar character is more modern in attire, using a combination attachment so that Tightie can provide offensive or defensive support through the shields worn on each arm. These two close-quarters characters represent an older style of action where strength and endurance are among the measurements of heroes; whereas the avatars Bond and Fay utilize are distinctly modern with their firearm-based character builds (evoking the work of director Benny Chan (New Police Story; Raging Fire or, for American audiences, the John Wick series under the care of Chad Stahelski).
L: Jessica Chan Yee-Chun as FaFa in GOOD GAME. Photo courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival.
For all of this good, the execution of the narrative could use more time and space. Writers Xin He (Mutation on Mars) and June Zhong, from a story by Law, smartly places Bond and Tightie as the central characters who create the connective tissue for everything else, taking its time to establish both, as well as the supporting characters and their collective relationships. Especially when the film takes its more dramatic turns, this aids the audience in feeling the intended weight. But once Happy Hour is formed, the gameplay portions take up a great deal of space without having been established in a way that makes them accessible, even for longtime gamers. For instance, Happy Hour goes from talking about signing up for the One Shot Tournament and, in the next scene, is playing. It’s not until the game is over that we realize that it was a competition game as part of the tournament. There had been no setup for the game, no explanation of its rules, nothing at all. Through the use of in-game tech that displays important HUD (heads up display) information (health, stats, etc.), the audience is able to glean a few things about the game being played, but never enough to fully understand the rules in order to understand more than “must beat the opposition,” especially as special custom rules are set for different matches — VIP, bomb disposal, and others. It might make the film a little longer to ensure that the audience is clued more tightly in, and it could have been done through Octo and his wife, Lan (Alice Fung So-Bor), who function as the casual gamers who come to Tightie’s café as a part of Lan’s cognitive care plan, providing ideal opportunities for exposition.
L-R: Ng Siu-Hin as Sing, Will Or as Bond, Lo Kwan Lam as Octo, Andrew Lam as Tightie, and Yanny Chan as Fay in GOOD GAME. Photo courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival.
Good Game is a good time as a fairly low-stakes sports tale. It’s got heart, humor, and the action is stylized in such a way to be clever, even if not as fully engaging as it seeks to be. What it does right more than makes up for the weaknesses, which matters because, at the end of the tale, this is a film about people, not the sport itself. This is, of course, a testament to Leung and the writers in terms of understanding what makes a sports film resonant. Whether it’s enough for audiences to want to go another round is yet to be determined, but, ultimately, I don’t think its going to leave folks disappointed — win, lose, or draw.
Screened during Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
For more information, head to the official Fantasia International Film Festival Good Game webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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