Philadelphia Weekly

You might assume holding the all-time high score on a 1980s upright Donkey Kong machine is an achievement so dubious (not to mention potentially embarrassing) that any questions or disputes over such a silly, trifling matter could at least be settled amicably.

But as Seth Gordon's weirdly enthralling, hilarious documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters demonstrates, this is extremely serious business--at least to a narrow but passionate niche of classic arcade gaming buffs who fanatically guard their records and protect their heroes with a zealotry that would probably be terrifying, were it not so damn funny.

The movie's proof of that old adage about battles being more vicious when the stakes are so low. It's also the rousing crowd-pleaser I wanted Rocky Balboa to be.

The most hissable movie villain in ages, Billy Mitchell is a slick Florida hot-sauce magnate with a kickass mullet and a penchant for patriotic neckties. Back in 1982 he set all sorts of video-game high scores on everything from Donkey Kong to BurgerTime, and has been dining out on his achievements ever since. Revered as some sort of gaming god by a creepy gang of sycophants, Billy speaks strictly in self-aggrandizing platitudes and is so arrogant you'll want to throw things at the screen.

Poor Steve Wiebe probably never had a chance. A schlumpy, affable fellow from Washington with chronically rotten luck, Steve got laid off from his job at Boeing the day he signed his mortgage, and took to playing an old Donkey Kong machine in his garage, whiling away those long, unemployed afternoons.

Among many things I was blissfully unaware of before seeing The King of Kong is the legendary status of the game that introduced us all to a plumber named Mario. Purportedly the most difficult arcade diversion ever unleashed, Donkey Kong demands all sorts of convoluted pattern recognition skills to master, as well as an ability to improvise around the machine's more devious, randomized elements. But soon Weibe smashes Billy Mitchell'sdecades-old record. And that's when things start to get strange.

The "official scorekeepers" at an organization called Twin Galaxies mysteriously refuse to verify Steve's score. Citing Wiebe's friendship with a man who calls himself Mr. Awesome (former Missile Command champ and longtime Mitchell enemy Roy Shildt), the referees suspect foul play, even going so far as to break into Steve's garage so they can examine his console.

The Twin Galaxies gatekeepers, led by a folk-singing lunatic named Walter Day, soon require our hero to prove his mettle under their scrutiny, at an officially sanctioned location like New Hampshire's Funspot (a place where, I note with a Proustian shudder, this critic used to dump a lot of quarters into what appears to still be the same damn Donkey Kong machine).

Would you be surprised if I told you Billy Mitchell just so happens to be an associate Twin Galaxies referee, and also something like their public spokesperson? (Walter Day wrote a lovely song about his joystick prowess.)

Every time Wiebe rises to the occasion and meets the organization's insane demands, their sneaky, underhanded tactics grow weirder and more desperate. Suspect videotapes are hand-delivered by elderly female Q*Bert champions in the middle of the night, and that's just the start of Mitchell's Machiavellian maneuvering.

What makes The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters improbably compelling is how something as trivial as Steve Wiebe's video-game score blossoms into a rallying cry for the noble underdog, battling against a crooked system of cronyism and arrogant, entrenched power. Director Gordon knows exactly what he's doing here, pushing all the right nostalgia buttons with music cues like Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," and that annoyingly catchy montage tune from The Karate Kid.

You'll spend the first half of the picture giggling at the folks who take this stuff so seriously. You'll spend the second half on the edge of your seat.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
A-
Director: Seth Gordon
Starring: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell
Opens Fri., Sept. 7