Max Beyond review – game tie-in with green-eyed kid jumping realities in search of brother

Drifting between realities … Max Beyond. Photograph: The Movie Partnership/HaZimation

It’s been a two-way street: there are movie spin-offs of video games, and vice versa. Now comes this British animation, made at the same time as a companion game due out next year (and animated using the technology behind Fortnite). Like Blade Runner, it’s set in a futuristic American city with impossibly tall skyscrapers. Like the cult Japanese anime Akira, the storyline concerns experiments on children. Here they’re being treated at a research facility owned by an evil mega-corp where AI security guards with hi-tech machine guns keep out the protesters.

One of the kids inside is Max, a fragile boy with huge sad green eyes (voiced by Cade Tropeano). Max has been having violent dreams in which his much older brother, tough ex-marine Leon (Dave Fennoy), tries to rescue him, blasting his way past security. Leon always dies at the end of Max’s dreams – a dozen different deaths to give gamers a taste of what’s to come. The thing is, Max is not dreaming. He’s “rifting” into parallel universes. For reasons only half-explained by the script, he can jump between realities; Max is searching for the one in which Leon lives.

It takes a while for Max’s endlessly replayed rescue to get tiring. A butterfly wing flap here, and Leon’s switches from war hero to an emaciated drug addict, who was dishonourably discharged from the marines. The variations are cleverly explained by the script, but inevitably it begins to feel like watching someone else playing a video game. The underdeveloped characters don’t help; the only interesting one of the bunch is ambitious ruthless doctor Ava (Jane Perry), with clicky sharp heels and faux gentle bedside manner. The film recycles some well-worn dystopian tropes of society on the brink of chaos, but as sci-if it’s not exactly wrestling with the big questions about life or the universe.

• Max Beyond is on UK digital platforms from 22 April, and US digital platforms from 23 April