Best Player Review

This review comes from my Letterboxd profile, where I review every single movie I watch.

Honestly, at this point, I'm having a lot of trouble being able to give anybody the benefit of the doubt here. I just finished my iCarly marathon earlier today (the day I wrote this review), and it was great. When I finished that marathon, I just scrolled through again to see what else there was and I saw Best Player, a movie I haven't seen in years and wanted to at least see one more time to get my thoughts on it. I really tried to at least give this movie another chance and try and see the positives in here, but honestly, there really aren't that many. The actors are trying their best and the direction is polished, but that's pretty much all I can say about this completely ridiculous and poorly thought-out film with an illogical script and poorly edited comedic timing.

Let's start with what might be the most obvious problem of this entire film -- Jerry Trainor and Jennette McCurdy being the stars here. Now, their performances aren't the problem because they're likable actors and they can make this really dumb dialogue at least come off natural. Again, it's not the acting I have a problem with at all. However, in the case of these two specifically, it really just feels like they were cast in parts that were written like their parts on iCarly to capitalize on getting audiences to watch their chemistry because that's all this movie really has going for it. It's painfully obvious that these characters are just clone copies of their characters from the show -- the immature man child that gets himself in hilariously slapstick situations and the sassy teen girl that flakes out in school. They're just playing those same parts again, and it just feels really cheap.

This movie just reminded me of other Nickelodeon sitcoms that I think are much better than this. Of course, the leads are from iCarly and their writing feels like it's trying to be from iCarly, but the difference is that iCarly felt a lot more grounded in its style of humor, relatable, and plain likable. In the case of Best Player, the slapstick humor is executed and edited so terribly and the punchlines are so surface-level-trying-to-take-themselves-seriously that they consistently come across as flat. Part of this has to do with that glossy direction I was talking about earlier. While the movie is nice to look at, the sheen this movie has just made the humor come across like it's trying to emulate the delivery of Big Time Rush, but it doesn't have the energy that show has, either. Big Time Rush's slapstick comedy constantly works because it knows exactly how to edit its soundtrack and pacing and the actors know exactly how over-the-top their facial expressions and vocal deliveries should be to make it feel like it has elements of a live-action cartoon while still also being able to feel like another relatable, likable sitcom. This film takes itself so seriously that it doesn't allow that over-the-top slapstick humor to shine, and when they try to, it just feels horribly contrived. There's a scene where Jerry Trainor's Q gets startled awake by a duck, trips over a table, and bashes into some drums before flipping over into a hot top. Physics-wise, how in the world does that even work?! Wouldn't he just trip and fall on the table?! Even in iCarly, the slapstick comedy usually just ends in a simple pratfall or over-the-top situation caused by a logical cause of pain or startlement, like a fall or a sudden fire. Here, it feels like there's no logical slapstick moment anywhere in this film.

But, okay, taking this as its own movie, taking it separately from my genuine appreciation for iCarly and Big Time Rush, is it still possibly somewhat good? No! The lead character, Q, is a complete jerk who literally just sits around on his parent's couch expecting to be able to play video games in their basement for the rest of his life and then tries to sabotage a teenage girl out of winning prize money for a video game tournament. Yes, he learns a lesson by the end of the film, but there's never a moment in which you really feel he's truly learned a lesson, he just kind of changes, and you're supposed to accept that. Throughout the majority of this movie, I was honestly rooting for Jennette McCurdy's Chris because she had a fairly good head on her shoulders and she wasn't, you know, trying to sabotage anyone to achieve her goals. This movie also makes the weird decision of revolving a reveal of her playing around the idea that girls are generally horrible at video games, which is just a ridiculous stereotype to begin with, and that gamers, in general, shouldn't focus on romance because there's no way that a gamer can love. This is really the kind of plot development the script is giving its characters? Really?

What I feel most annoyed with about this movie, however, is the video games themselves. HOW ON EARTH DO THESE GAMES WORK?! They have this Kinect-like technology that allows them to play these video games, but there's no Kinect-like device, how the heck do those gloves and controllers work? The games are never always first-person or always third-person, the gameplay is animated like even the player is watching an animated movie. There are no strict rules to the attacks and skills that each avatar has, so you're basically just watching a bunch of random scenes of poorly rendered avatars attacking each other with whatever the animators thought looked like a cool fighting move. This tournament, of course, happens to have a grand prize total of the exact amount of money Q needs to achieve his goal, and it somehow knows which players to pick based on whether or not they reach a certain score by the end of a certain playing period. During the actual tournament, there are essentially no rules. Players are allowed to cheat and team up as they wish, no questions asked. It doesn't help that the trailer used to promote the primary game in this film literally just steals the gameplay footage shown later in the film, demonstrating the animators clearly didn't have much of a budget to animate many scenes. In fact, that's the most glaring issue with anything involving any of these high-tech video games that are so high tech their rules don't even make any sense -- the animation is TERRIBLE!!! It looks like one of those ripoff direct-to-DVD films from Video Brinquedo or some other production company that makes those kinds of knockoff films, it's absolutely terrible. I don't buy that these are the hottest high tech games in the world during this movie's timeline because even taking out the almost lifelike graphics some video games have today, there were some really good looking games in 2011 that looked INFINITELY better than whatever monstrosities the animators threw on the screen for these avatars. The most important aspect of the entire film is these high-tech video games, and it feels like the writers don't even understand how video games work. That's the saddest aspect of all of this.

I genuinely thought I was gonna go easier on this movie, but once it ended, I just felt really mad. Its pacing is so bad it feels like it's a two-hour movie instead of an hour and a half one, its characters are so one-note and cliche that I rooted for the only person that seemingly had some sort of moral code throughout the course of the move, the video game aspects of this movie make absolutely no sense, and the humor falls flat every single time. The actors are trying and the direction looks okay and that's literally all I can say about this absolute trainwreck of a TV movie. I thought this would be one of those movies that I would recognize was bad, but that I would still genuinely enjoy watching, like Shrek the Third or something, but no, this is just awful. Oh, and the characters are cliche, too. There's the classic socially awkward nerd, the classic mean girl, the classic nice guy jock, oh, and this movie doesn't even resolve the primary conflict that is set up in the opening scene of the movie!! What am I supposed to say to that?! You can't even resolve your own story!!! Whatever. I never have to watch this movie again, and thank goodness, because it's gonna cause me to have "What time is it? It's chicken time" stuck in my head for the next week, and that's enough for me to say how rough of a time this was.

Letter Grade: D-

In all honesty, in the future, I might end up changing this to an F because good Lord, I hate this movie the more I think about it, but I'm just gonna give this film a little credit for now and maybe come back to it when I've had some time to let it settle in my head. Aye aye aye, what a way to end my Nickelodeon marathon, geez.