Film Review: Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest is a love letter to chasing high scores
Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest for Caroline Delaney Declan Burke
★★★★☆
(15A) is an offbeat documentary from Danish director Mads Hedegaard that follows Kim Kanoin (aka ‘Cannon Arm’) as he attempts to break the world record for playing the arcade video game Gyruss without a break.
The plan, which requires the help of all Kim’s arcade game-obsessed friends to work, is for Kim to play Gyruss for 100 hours — a mind-boggling effort in prospect, although Kim has previously clocked up 47 hours straight. It all sounds like an exercise in Sisyphean futility: Kim is so good that he finds himself negotiating countless repetitions of a spaceship blasting enemies out of existence — but the film is chock-a-block with fascinating characters.
Kim himself is a monosyllabic grandfather still sporting a 70s-style ponytail, and his friends are a diverse group whose specialisations — poetry, engineering, Bach, quantum physics — all play their part in Kim’s quest.
‘It’s kinda like Rocky,’ observes one of the friends, alluding to Kim’s refusal to be beaten, and while it’s not remotely akin to anything like Rocky, is still an absorbingly Quixotic story of enduring friendship.
(cinema release)
