Virtual reality is coming fast. YouTube is already filled with videos of people falling out of their chairs with what look like orthopaedic shoes strapped to their faces and it won’t be long before even the tiniest social aspect of mass entertainment is gone and we’re all slumped in our own exquisitely programmed worlds, the touch of another person’s hand or the whisper of breath in your ear nothing but a distant memory. You think Gogglebox is a horrific indictment of our ouroboric, lowest common denominator media excess? At least there people are sitting on the same sofa, saying words with their mouths. Give it 20 years and we’ll all be being drip-fed nutrients while Ant and Dec merge with the singularity to shoot howls of vaguely Midlands-inflected commentary on tightrope-walking Weimaraners straight into your frontal cortex.

The Call Up is set at some point presumably between the present day and that longed-for hour of reckoning. Here not only has virtual reality progressed to the point where it’s almost indistinguishable from real life, but the addition of special bodysuits means that what happens in the virtual world can be felt on your real body – in the case of this scenario that’s mainly getting shot, plus the occasional stabbing.

Here to live out every gamer’s wildest fantasy and actually run around getting shot are a highly identifiable bunch: a cute white guy, a cute white girl, a fat nerd, a bully, a black guy (also a soldier), a generic ethnic guy, a generic ethnic girl, and an old guy. Most of them you don’t have to worry about too much – that sounds like a spoiler, but you know in video games when you’re in a cutscene and the soldier next to you says something like “man, I can’t wait to see my kids again?” Yeah, you don’t learn that guy’s name.

The Call Up is initially promising, at least visually. It’s set in a towering and apparently wholly abandoned office block, all made up in the very latest Swedish minimalist laboratory white. The virtual reality comes in the form of helmets with sliding visors – slide them down and you’re suddenly in a series of rooms that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s played a game with a helicopter somewhere on the cover: all gritty exposed concrete and strategically places bulletproof wooden crates. Slide them up and you’re back in IKEA circa 2025, although you’re really still in the game – you just can’t see what’s happening. It’s a pretty cool conceit and it’s deployed well by director Charles Barker, whose background in commercial filmmaking for brands like Nokia and Vodafone are at the fore in this high-tech arcade. The problem is that it’s not really taken far enough; the idea isn’t strong enough to maintain its novelty throughout the film’s slightly overlong running time, and the visual effects aren’t varied enough to pique repeated interest. A couple of glances out at a ruined cityscape are all we get, then we’re back in darkened rooms.

Of course, things go downhill pretty quickly. It turns out, astonishingly, that an anonymous corporation which summons people to empty buildings to live out wildly violent fantasies is a little way down the moral spectrum from, say, Doctors Without Borders, and it’s not too long before our trigger-happy group isn’t just fighting grunting holograms of Russian soldiers. It’s here that the film gets a little fuzzy about what it’s trying to say. Is gaming bad? Is violence bad? Are people bad? Gaming is a major part of modern culture and still lacks the serious and consistent critical body which is crucial to the growth of any art form; witness the writhing mass of misogyny and self-righteousness which was GamerGate and it’s clear how desperately this field is crying out for a long hard look at itself. The Call Up could have been at least a step in this direction, but instead it pretty quickly devolves into exactly what it could have been smart about: repetitive violence and the sort of character growth that seems like it came out of a timed creative writing assignments where you spent the first 45 minutes talking about how cool the guns are.

Without the budget or creative choreography to be a mindlessly enjoyable action flick or the intellectual focus to be a real statement, The Call Up just feels kind of pointless. There are a couple of laughs, a couple of fun sequences, but really you’re better off doing what your mum always told you to do: switch off that damn screen and go get some fresh air. 2/5

Check out the rest of the latest cinema releases in our new movie reviews section including the Hank Marvin biopic I Saw The Light.