I'm just a loser who's good at old video games.
✯ 1/2
Adam Sandler's latest assault on Hollywood, Pixels was actually not as bad as I thought it would be. That isn't saying much, however, since there was literally only one thing I remotely liked about it: the celebrity cameos on TV. I'm not sure why I liked them, but it was the only thing that kept me going: who's going to appear next in this film? Who else needed a paycheck this desperately?
This film really could have been good. But Adam Sandler, although he's better than he was in The Cobbler, and Kevin James make an awful combination. James has been slipping in his stride lately, and that's bad enough. But when his groove is pulled down by more fart and poop jokes that hallmark the worst of Adam Sandler, he just plays as an accomplice to it all. He doesn't even really add anything to the film- it literally could have just been Sandler and Josh Gad and it would've worked just as well, although it wouldn't have been less awful.
What's even more depressing is that Peter freakin' Dinklage made it so much worse. He's a great actor, but he pulls off one of the worst "hood" accents I've ever heard. It's almost as if he was trying to be cool, but crashed and burned somewhere between rehearsals and filming. He's rich enough, I'm sure. Why did he have to take a paycheck to be in this garbage film?
Q*bert. This poor forgotten character of 80's gaming made a good enough appearance in Wreck-It Ralph. Yet the writers completely shattered this character and actually gave him audible dialogue. Q*bert speaks gibberish, he doesn't speak English! You aren't supposed to understand what he's saying! In all honesty, the writers probably made him understandable to market him towards kids, which is where I felt this film was leaning towards. Why the PG-13 rating? It could've easily gotten away with a slim PG rating and would've been just as bad. Kids today don't know who Q*bert is anymore, why make him a central sidekick?
I appreciate that Chris Columbus was trying to revive the 80's (ironically the decade of the best of his career), but did it have to be in such a terrible fashion? There's no way that Adam Sandler and Josh Gad knew each other when they were kids. It's not happening. They never met up in the quarter arcade, they never competed, they were never friends. It doesn't work that way. Another thing: Why is it that only the gamers could defeat the Galaga invaders? All they did was shoot high-tech laser guns. Seems pretty standard for the military to be handling these situations by themselves. There is literally no reason for Sandler and James to be taking on an alien army on their own. Their knowledge of these game characters don't give them some kind of advantage over the enemies and the military. Point and shoot is a pretty basic strategy.
I was looking forward to this film for a little while. I suppose the presence of Adam Sandler should have been a red flag right away for me. He seems to be in a downward slump in his career, and I find no joy in watching him make a complete idiot of himself on screen. Pixels, while marginally better than Sandler's last endeavor, is one of the worst movies of the summer and the year. Want to see a good 2015 movie titled Pixels? Watch this short of the same name by my friend Eli Hayes. I guarantee you it's Oscar material compared to this rubbish.