100 min | R | July 15, 2022 | Amazon Studios
V is a college gamer who blows up her own career and lands on an all-female esports team chasing a tournament spot. The movie wants to take on the boys’ club of competitive gaming. It throws the punch in slow motion and pulls it before it connects.
Vivian goes by V. She is a talented gamer who quits her college esports team after a humiliating online incident. To keep her scholarship, she joins an all-female squad that needs one more player to qualify for a tournament. The film wants to be a story about women carving space in a hostile gaming culture. It is really a collection of underdog beats arranged in the order you expect them.
Paris Berelc plays V with energy that the script never channels into a real character. She hits the marks of reluctance, doubt, and triumph without ever surprising you. Ruby Rose plays Parker, the team’s corporate sponsor, with a cool detachment that gives the film its only adult perspective. Hari Nef plays Sloane and brings a sharpness that the writing keeps reaching for and missing. The teammates exist as types rather than people, and the actors cannot fill in what the page leaves blank.
Kyle Newman directs from a script by Julia Yorks. The gaming sequences rely on screen-filling overlays of usernames, chat windows, and kill counters that try to make sitting at a keyboard look kinetic. The technique announces the film’s anxiety about its own subject. People staring at monitors is hard to shoot, and the editing cuts to reaction shots so often that the matches lose any sense of stakes. The visual language stays flat and bright, like a commercial for the lifestyle it depicts.
The film names the sexism of gaming culture and then declines to dramatize it with any teeth. Every conflict resolves on schedule. Every villain folds. The premise about women fighting for respect in a rigged arena deserves a script willing to let the fight hurt. This one sands every edge down until the whole thing slides past without leaving a mark.