Max Cloud is both a tribute to old-school 16-bit home video games and a spoof of B-movie Star Wars knock-offs and video game movies of the 1980s. Scott Adkins, a martial arts action star who made a career playing B-movie heroes and big-budget action movie villains, gets a rare opportunity at comedy playing Max Cloud, the macho, mission-driven hero of the video game that teenage girl Sarah (Isabelle Allen) finds herself trapped in. While her best friend Cowboy (Franz Drameh) keeps the game going out in the real world, she is stuck in the role of Max's sidekick Jake (Elliot James Langridge), trying to stay alive after their intergalactic ship crash lands on a prison planet and they have to battle a series of criminals while hunting for a power source for their ship.
The movie jumps back and forth between the real world and the video game odyssey, which sets them against a series of archly overacting villains and plays out against brightly colored backdrops that could have come from comic books. Her only hope of getting back into the material world is to get through all the levels of the game. That's pretty much the plot of the film, which is affectionate and self-aware—Max Cloud is reflexively chauvinist and egocentric until he confesses that his real dream is to be a pastry chef—without being particularly clever or funny.
Director and co-writer Martin Owen seems to think that simply acknowledging video game conventions and sci-fi movie clichés and referencing 1980s culture is funny in its own right. Adkins is given some brief but impressive action scenes between scenes of barking out cheesy dialogue and striking heroic poses. John Hannah, the only other name actor in the cast, is largely wasted as the scheming villain Revengor. It aspires to cartoonish absurdity but lacks the creative ingenuity or madcap performances to sell it. The nostalgia may appeal to some adults but mostly this is aimed at kids. The unrated film is family-friendly and includes cartoonish video game violence with no explicit imagery or objectionable language. Optional purchase.