Pixels

Garbage In Motion

Step right up ladies and gentlemen!  Right this way!  

Have I got a film for your viewing displeasure!  

Enter into the cinema to hand over your hard-earned money for a film that defies the senses and baffles the mind!

Interested in a comedy with no jokes?!

A thriller without any peril?!

A film seriously casting the guy from Paul Blart: Mall Cop as the President of the United States?!

Well then, boy, is this film for you!

I honestly try not to swear in my reviews; I feel like it lowers the tone, does the film a disservice and I come across like I cannot voice my arguments properly.

But my God, F##K THIS FILM!

PLOT

When they are 13 years old, Adam Sandler, Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage participate in an arcade video game tournament.  Footage of this, and the games themselves, are sent into outer space as some kind of time capsule or message of peace, I really can't remember.

Anyway, aliens intercept it, interpret it as a declaration of war and therefore send versions of those video games to destroy present-day Earth.

So since Sandler's best friend Kevin James (of Paul Blart: Mall Cop) is the US President...sigh... he enlists Sandler's expertise, as well as Gad and Dinklage to fight back against the video game-aliens.

Think Ghostbusters with video-game aliens replacing the ghosts.

(Good God, I'm so sorry Ghostbusters.  You do not need to be mentioned in the same review as this mess.)

My feelings exactly, Josh Gad.

OPINIONS

"But, Mike...!", I hear you cry, "...just why is this such a horrid stench on the map of movies through the years?!"

I'm glad you asked.

Pixels will be used as evidence in future years when someone eventually decides to call Adam Sandler and Happy Madison Productions on their current strategy of creating bull$hit films for an amazing amount of money (on average $71.5 million, from 2010's Grown Ups up until now), phoning in performances, paying his friends extraordinary fees and never even trying to make their films funny.

What happened to the Adam Sandler of The Wedding Singer?  Happy Gilmore?  Punch-Drunk Love?! The guy who came from Saturday Night Live with so much promise and actual comedic acting-chops?  Instead, Pixels features the 'dead behind the eyes' performance that we've gotten used to over the years.  A guy who turns up to earn the paycheck and then go back to his trailer.

Despite the pixels around him,
Sandler's performance is the most fake thing in this photo...

Uuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, this film...

There is just an overall sense of confusion over the movie.

Early on, Sandler jokes that Paul Blart: US President's wife hates him, and they have a chuckle.  But his wife (played by the fantastic Jane Krakowski) adores him and puts up with his buffoonery regardless.

Yeah, we should be disappointed we lost this one...

Whilst combating Pac-Man, Peter Dinklage's character enters a cheat code. A cheat code!  In real life!  Not in a video game, but real life!  How?!  How does that actually work?!  It's never explained!

When the aliens first arrive, they engage in an aerial dogfight, which humans lose against Galaga.  Fair enough. They tell us to prepare for the next battle, but it's Breakout.  They proceed to destroy the Taj Mahal.  How could humans have beaten that?  It's a one player game.

After the humans win one of the battles, they get a video game character as a 'trophy'.  One of these is Qbert, the lovable orange blob thing that lights up steps by jumping on them.  But after the war is over, Qbert just morphs into a female video game character that Josh Gad's creepy basement-dweller has been obsessing over since a teenager.  ......Why?  Where was Qbert's say in this?  Isn't that just a bit sinister?  And does that make her a literal 'trophy-wife'?

I'm getting literally angry thinking about this film.

Why is Peter Dinklage in this pile of rancid slime?  Brian Cox, Sean Bean, Michelle Monaghan, all of them.  They're credible actors that don't have to put up with this $hit.

Qbert before he gets malformed into a man's 'non-speaking pretty thing'

When you have such a plethora of video game franchises to work with, the limitless possibilities of using memorable intellectual properties in humorous scenarios as well as Nintendo's allowance to use iconic characters such as Donkey Kong, Mario and even Duck Hunt, you can't come out with something as terrible and pointless as Pixels.  It's a crime.  Although everything seems to be a crime in this film.

Adam Sandler and Happy Madison Productions kidnapped my childhood innocence.

They stole money from countless unsuspecting audiences around the world.

They beat and battered my sense of decency.

They indecently exposed their cash-hungry scheme to throw together a film just to create box-office.

They fraudulently sold me the idea of fantastically-realised video games in real life.

And they murdered any chance of that happening in the future.

LET'S WRAP IT UP

In someone else's hands, Pixels could have been an ode to a time-long-forgotten.  It could have joined the ranks of Wreck-It-Ralph and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World as examples of love letters to the past-time.

Arcade machines could have made a retro comeback into popular culture instead of kitsh memorabilia.

Hell, Nintendo could have started to come around to the idea of a Legend of Zelda or Metroid film, but Sandler and director Chris Columbus took the easy route.

"Let's just put random video game characters everywhere!  It doesn't matter about context!  Nostalgia will mask everything!"

Stuff like this is why video games aren't treated with the same respect as films and books as an art form.  You've set the gaming community back another few years, so thank you for that.

From a true fan of both video games and film, fuck you Happy Madison Productions.  And goodnight.

Rating - 1/10 (since I can't give 0/10)

Until next time folks, thanks for reading!

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