Director Dickson Leung’s Good Game takes on the world of eSports with surprising wit, heart, and fun. The action comedy plays Fantasia Film Fest 2025.
The new frontier in sports movies is eSports. Given the right tone, the right unique entry point, it can be a new take on a well-worn genre (the sports movie). Enter director Dickson Leung’s charming Good Game. The film manages to take the heart and spirit of every great sports film and transplant it into the world of computers, keyboards, and mice.
Solo (Will Or) is a selfish gamer whose egotistical ways cost his corporate-funded eSports team not just to be fired but to be disbanded. Trying to find refuge and just play games, he ends up at a dying internet café run by Tai (Andrew Lam). Tai has dreams bigger than the café. When Tai’s daughter, Fay (Yanny Chan,) sees Solo – instantly recognizing him – she mentions a half-baked plan to have him join their eSports team in a chance to win one of the biggest events, Hong Kong One. Tai somehow convinces Solo to join a team they do not have. Tai, along with Fay, and former action movie star Octo (Lo Meng), for this ragtag group that Solo begins to push and bully into shape. Slowly but surely, this group of underdogs forms a tight-knit family … one that could win it all if Solo doesn’t ruin it all with his selfish ways.
Rather than give us screens of CGI-created action and heads-up displays, Leung has wisely chosen to shoot the in-game scenes as live action. So the action is real-life actors doing real-life acts (with a healthy amount of visual effects work). The result is something that’s altogether fun and engaging in a way that many audiences would not be expecting from a movie about eSports. Yes, there are the perquisite moments of the teams at their computers, but it’s always filled with drama or character moments and not just scenes of keyboard and mouse clicks.
The film does take its winning formula from those underdog sports movies like Dodgeball, Next Goal Wins, and The Replacements. That combination of comedy and pathos, along with action, is here in the film, just done in a newer context. Director Leung and screenwriters Xin He, Ken Ho-Ming Law, and June Zhong do a wonderful job of creating a film that gives just enough context for the novice can follow along without any knowledge of this world.
Good Game is an unexpected combination of comedy, action, and drama that anyone will find entertaining.