Movie of the Week: ‘The King of Kong’ – The best video game movie ever made
If you’re to believe the hype of modern Hollywood, movie adaptations of popular video games are due to be the next big thing. Despite the fact that such movies have been the laughing stock of cinema since the dawn of the new millennium, recent successes in the subgenre, such as HBO’s The Last of Us and the highly anticipated Super Mario Bros movie, have raised the profile of the previously belittled video game release.
Nintendo’s Mario brothers aren’t the only video game characters bouncing to the big screen in 2023 either, with a Gran Turismo film also slated for release alongside Apple’s low-key story about the creation of Tetris and Paramount’s Dungeons and Dragons, which has inspired countless copycat RPG’s over the years. Indeed, it’s an inevitability that a great video game movie will be made within the next three years, but that’s if you don’t already count the 2007 documentary, The King of Kong.
Less about the story and characters of one release specifically, Seth Gordon’s documentary follows the passionate gamers who help make video games the worldwide phenomenon that they are today. But we’re not talking about the frivolous exploits of Call of Duty or FIFA. The serious gamers of The King of Kong are battling it out for supremacy in classic arcade games, namely 1981’s Donkey Kong.
The 2007 Slamdance hit tells the story of Steve Wiebe, an American two-time world champion of Donkey Kong and the first person to achieve over a million points in the game, who is attempting to take the all-time high score from his arch-rival and fellow pro-gamer Billy Mitchell. What follows is a Shakespearean drama that speaks to man’s lofty ambitions to ‘be the best’ whilst others deceive their way to the top.
“The average Donkey Kong game doesn’t last a minute, it’s absolute brutality,” Mitchell utters in the film with an utterly straight face, adding a dose of melodrama to an otherwise innocuous arcade machine. This sincerity with which the film and its subject matter are presented makes it such a joy to behold. Without documentarians slyly curling their nose up to the sound of grown men treating video games as if they were a matter of life and death, The King of Kong instead feels like a love letter to a new kind of modern competition that feels as much made by gamers as the director himself.
Much like the reality TV shows of the early 2000s, the subjects of Gordon’s film speak with a charming earnestness, as if the camera is a video diary to privately confide in. These aren’t obnoxious characters playing up to the camera. They are genuine competitors fighting it out to be the best in their field who go about their e-sport with the utmost sincerity. As Wiebe points out with a stone-cold stare, “It’s not even about Donkey Kong anymore”.
Indeed, the rivalry between Wiebe and Mitchell is the film’s main storyline, and by the end of the movie, you’ll care about both characters as much as you care about Rocky and Drago in Rocky IV. In the blue corner is the likeable husband and modest challenger Wiebe, and in the red corner is the somewhat arrogant, controversial serial winner who isn’t quite aware of his own absurdity, saying at one point: “No matter what I say, it draws controversy. Sort of like the abortion issue”.
A celebration of everything great about gaming, with a sprinkling of what makes it divisively toxic, too, The King of Kong is the best video game movie of all time that shows Hollywood how it’s done.
