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'Pixels' Game over for Sandler's comedy
When something is not broken then do not fix it
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When something is not broken then do not fix it. It is probably an adage that Adam Sandler has held on to for most of his movie career.
Recent releases from Sandler's production company Happy Madison, such as Grown Ups and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, received harsh criticism from critics yet they still managed to reap significant returns at the box office.
In Pixels, Sandler and his team of director Chris Columbus and writer Tim Herlihy seem to have opted for maintaining this familiar approach by making a stupid yet potentially profitable comedy movie.
In fact, Pixels seems to be Sandler's own ode to all of his preceding harshly criticized yet commercially successful comedies.
Pixels, a movie about an alien invasion that comes in the form of 1980s game characters, kicks off almost exactly like Grown Ups.
The film starts by going back to the year 1982, a time when most kids spent their quarters and pennies at arcade centers and played video games like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Asteroids.
During that year, a young Sam Brenner (Anthony Ippolito) was a respected young gamer and he had taken part in the World Gaming Championships after being motivated by his best friend, Will Cooper (Jared Riley).
In the final, however, Sam lost to Eddie 'Fire Blaster' Plant (Andrew Bambridge). The defeat would leave a mark on Sam's personality and affect his life journey as an adult.
You can probably already guess by now that the adult version of Sam is portrayed by Sandler and this story again represents another typical formula and plot in his movies ' a zero-to-hero story riddled with sexist and buddy-themed jokes.
The adult Sam is now working as a television and electronic-systems installer. His wife cheated on him and left him. He goes door to door taking orders if ever someone needs their television set installed and according to his company's regulations, he must always introduce himself as a nerd every time he visits a client to get paid.
However, amid the grind of doing the daily job he hates, Sam has the opportunity that most blue collar Americans do not have: the luxury to call the President of the United States his best friend.
That's right. The adult Will (played by Sandler's best buddy Kevin James) has grown to become one of the most powerful men on earth.
During their casual talks together, Will often tells Sam that he is meant to do great things in his life if only he can regain his confidence back.
The events in Pixels then, as we all can guess, provide all the requirements for Sam to do something big in his life and become a hero.
Aliens suddenly attack a US military base in Guam and no, they do not come in the form of slimy things with huge teeth and tentacles. Instead, they come in the form of pixelated video game characters from the 1980s and they turn everything they touch into pixels and destroy them.
Why would aliens attack earth in the form of Super Mario, Donkey Kong, etc.? Because during the 1982 Video Gaming Championships NASA decided to send out into space a module containing files of the earth's pop culture at that time, including the video game characters, in the hope of contacting alien life forms.
The attempt to communicate, however, was interpreted by the aliens as a challenge to war and they accepted by invading our planet in the form of these gaming characters for reasons unknown.
The war's rule is simple: planet earth has three lives or chances ' just like in the old games ' to deal with the aliens and if they lose, the world will be completely obliterated ['¦] or more accurately, pixelated.
In this desperate time, Will, the most powerful man in the US, suddenly decides to recruit Sam to deal with the alien invasion simply because of his excellent track record in beating classic games.
The two childhood friends then add more firepower by recruiting another prodigal gamer from the 1982 tournament, Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad), and even Sam's nemesis, Eddie (portrayed by Peter Dinklage as an adult).
Using classic 1980s gaming characters, buddy-themes and Sandler's typical over-the-top humor recipe, Pixels might seem to be a perfect movie for nostalgia and one to revisit our own childhood with the digital characters we used to adore.
The movie poster with a huge Pac Man trying to devour the entire city of San Francisco seems to be promising. The computer graphic imagery used in the film to make all the classic gaming characters come into life is everything that a fan boy or gaming geek could ever dream about.
However, despite all that, for some reason, Sandler and his team just cannot get it right in bringing back the excitement and the vibe of classic video gaming.
There was a time when Sandler's dumb comedy was actually good ' and it was the 1990s. Time has moved on but Sandler has not. In Pixels, what we have is repetition after repetition of his old recipes that make most of his jokes predictable and therefore boring.
To make things worse, Pixels is very patriarchal, and in many senses, it even comes to close to being misogynistic ' the female characters simply serve as eye candy for men.
The main female character, Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) only ends up as girl-toy for Sam.
Perhaps the most distasteful form of exploitation in the film surrounds four-time Emmy Award nominated actress Jane Krakowsi. She is only given a couple of lines playing Jane Cooper, the US First Lady and spends most of her time in awe when watching Sam and the gang fighting the aliens.
There are also many holes in the plot that make Pixels an almost senseless cinematic experience. A movie about a pixelated alien invasion may not need to heave too closely to common sense, but one way or another, there should be at least an explanation for how and why Sam and his friends can be so good at translating their video gaming skills into real life battles ' a question that remains unanswered throughout the film.
In the end, Pixels is basically another washed up, dumb Sandler comedy flick, only with better visual and digital effects. It is perhaps a fitting movie for Sandler to realize that it is game over for his rehashed comedy recipes.
' Photos courtesy of Columbia Pictures
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Pixels
(Columbia Pictures, running time 1 hour 46 minutes)
Directed by Chris Columbus
Produced by Adam Sandler, Chris Columbus, Allen Covert, Mark Radcliffe, Michael Barnathan
Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad, Brian Cox, Ashley Benson, Jane Krakowski
