Review of Pixels (2015) by Colginator — 07 Aug 2015

Video games really don't have a good reputation when it comes to having film adaptations. Sure we have a few good one's like Wreck it Wralph or Scott Pilgrim, but for the most part they seem to go down the same route as the Super Mario Bros movie where the film loses all the charm that made the game enjoyable to begin with. Part of the reason for this is they always seem to be put into dreadful hands. This time those dreadful hands are Happy Madison Productions, Sandler's film studio that have been producing his cinematic turds for 15 years now. And once again they have produced another insulting comedy, lacking any real charm and being light on laughs.

The plot unfolds because back in the 80's NASA sent several video games in to space to communicate to extraterrestrials. But their message of peace was misinterpreted as a declaration of war and the aliens send several video game characters to attack the earth. Thus President Cooper (Kevin James) recruits his childhood friend and gaming champion Brenner (Adam Sandler) to fight off the alien invasion.

Right away we've really got to suspend disbelief to accept the plot. Not just because of having to accept the poorly explained justification of why the aliens are attacking as video games, but also buying Kevin James as president of the USA. It's never explained how he became President, but unless Donald Trump was the only other candidate there's no way he could've gotten voted into the position. Especially considering he plays the same annoying character he always does of the dumb guy who does nothing but hang out with Adam Sandlers character.

None of the other characters are much better. Sandler has as much charisma as a plank of wood. Josh Gad's performance as the nerdy friend is annoying from the start. The only one who gets even a chuckle is Dinklage as the over the top douchey rival, but even that gets worn out quickly. Also just like all Sandler productions we get a lot of offensive stereotypes. This time the focus is on geek stereotypes, like gamers are antisocial weirdo's who have no lives and live in their mothers basement. Albeit this isn't the most offensive stereotype, but it's still insulting one of the film's biggest audiences.

Besides this there are other typical offensive representations we see in all Sandler movies, like women being nothing more than eye candy. In fact there are only two female characters in lead roles. The first is Michelle Monaghan who's in the film only to give Sandlers character somebody to flirt with. The other is Ashley Benson who plays one of the video game characters who comes to life, who not only doesn't get a single line of dialogue in the film but also ends up being a literal trophy for one of the characters.

Having some of gaming's most recognisable icons, you'd really think the film would actually do something good with them. But it doesn't. The gaming characters will just attack Sandler and co. only for the humans to fight back and that's it. It never tries to actually make any jokes with these characters, but instead does the same thing as a film like Disaster Movie where it will try to get a laugh by just naming something popular. The only video game icon they do anything else with is Q*bert, who is one of their trophies to help them. But all they have him do is typical annoying Sandler humour like watching Q*bert wet himself with pixels and some weak slapstick.

Although at least the gaming icons they use actually look good. It's not like the Mario Bro's Movie where Goomba's looked like a pear on the body of Frankenstein and instead the 3d CGI models maintain the charm of the original designs. But to me this makes the film even worse than typical Sandler comedies because it ends up feeling like such wasted potential. Had a better production been given the chance to use these characters, we might have got a charming homage to video games. But instead we got a typical Sandler comedy, just as unfunny as always but with a bigger effects budget.