Review of Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (2014) by Dustin P — 18 Jan 2016

When YouTube was in its infancy, one of the biggest stars on there during those days was the Angry Video Game Nerd. Since then, YouTube has blown up and countless YouTube Stars have gone on to get movie deals and make their own movies. So it only seems fitting that one of the first gets his own movie.

When this movie first came out there was a mixed reaction from fans. Having now seen it, I can understand why it was met with varying feelings and opinions.

First of all, this was a very low budget movie that was basically crowdfunded to be made. They raised over $300k dollars on crowdfunding alone. Considering the size of this project and the people involved were just film school grads with no real mainstream connections, it was impressive that they could reach such a feat.

With that said, this movie looks at times to be better than 10x its budget, yet at other times looks 10x below its budget. The first portion of the movie (excluding car scenes, which I'll get to) looks and feels like a major release. The cinematography and the lighting early on actually is pretty good. The problem is once the movie gets to action scenes, and eventually the ending with a giant monster attacking the world, it looks cheap as hell. There is an overuse of green screens with people running in place and cheap looking miniatures. I understand the miniatures were meant to look cheap, but doing it once would have been a nice little gag (like they did with the dummy pratfalls), instead of constantly showing bad miniatures that look like toys blowing up and burning. You get so taken out of the movie by the second half because of the over reliance on green screen. They couldn't even get a fan when two of the main characters are supposed to be fighting on top of the Eiffel tower (in Las Vegas) to make it look like they're actually outside. It just looked like the two characters were fighting on an unfinished set.

But these aren't the biggest problem with the movie. These are just symptoms of what is just a really convoluted mess of a script. It seemed like they wanted to make several different movies so they just threw them all into the script. We get a zombie segment that serves no purpose, an unnecessary laser fight with cardboard robots, the aforementioned Eiffel tower fight, a road trip movie, a conspiracy/adventure movie akin to WarGames, and a Toho-like giant monster movie. The script is a mess and I had trouble even following what was going on despite it being a pretty cliche story underneath all the superfluous nonsense.

The real disappointment with this movie was that they tried to do too much instead of just doing one thing really well. There was no reason they couldn't have just made this a basic road trip comedy akin to Dumb & Dumber or Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. If they took out the second half of the movie, it would have been great. The best parts of this movie are actually the fairly simple parts. I honestly (and couldn't believe I actually did) laugh at loud at the scene where the customers of a game store are doing a conga-line when wanting the nerd to review ET. It was simple. Then there was the zombie scene which (while being unnecessary) was actually the most impressive segment of the movie. The little gag they do where the two characters are having sex, but it turns out that they're just playing a video game was actually really funny. It was incredibly predictable, but what made it funny were the clever little lines they threw in ("I've never done it on the rag before"). There is even a shot that needs worth mentioning that I really liked. There's a shot where the four main characters are huddled in a refrigerator that is actually really nicely framed and shot. It's no mystery how it was shot, but it just looks really good, and is way too contrasting compared to the bad green screen shots.

They could have saved a lot of money by not doing the nonsensical parts of the movie, and then using that money to make a better road trip movie. They could have shot on more locations, and save it all for a big chase scene finale. They could have written a script where the nerd has to get to the Atari landfill because a new gaming company wants to dig up the games in honor of the release of their new shitty game. Then he feels compelled to stop it, the gaming company tries to stop him along the way, and at the end of the movie he gets to the landfill that they've turned into a big convention/carnival that they could use as the backdrop to a chase scene to end the movie (ala Pee-Wee's Big Adventure). And with the extra money, they could have sprung for shooting in actual moving cars instead of green screens. Maybe even rent a helicopter to get some over-the-head shots of the van.

I can't imagine what kind of issues they may have faced when making the movie, but going based on what I saw, I know there was potential for something better than this. It could have been the next Clerks, an extreme low budget movie that showed off the skills of its crew and led to bigger projects. But with all the nonsense, in the end it becomes just a laughable mess that won't lead to anything other than decent returns on videos sold to the extremely loyal fans.