Pixels
Genre: Sci-fi action comedy
Director: Chris Columbus
Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad
Storyline: A bunch of gaming nerds have to save the world
There’s really no nice way to say this: Pixels is inarguably the most god-awful film I’ve seen in a long while. It’s premised on nostalgia for a niche memory of the 1980s — centred around the universe of first-generation video games — but that’s just a thin veneer for a celebration of utterly useless geekdom that reeks of self-gratification in the extreme. The trouble with going far out on a limb on nostalgia for such a niche memory is that unless the memory is shared widely and vividly enough, it doesn’t have a critical mass of folks for whom the nostalgic experience comes as a blast from the past. But even for those who have played all the video games the film invokes — from Pac-Man to Galaga to Donkey Kong to Centipede — the games served as little more than a rite of passage, an insignificant playtime milestone on the path to young adulthood. But Pixels looks to paint them as a dominant sub-culture of those times, for which there resides in folks today an abiding yearning.
There’s really no such longing, which is why the central characters — gaming geeks from the 1980s — summon up in viewers little or no resonance, even though they are on a mission to save the world from aliens, no less. Granted, it’s only a science-fiction comedy, and so the storyline doesn’t have to have credulity of the highest order, but Pixels falters simply because its scriptwriters couldn’t care less, and neither can you. Even the special effects sequences, which you would expect to be a high point of such a film, are a total failure.
The film therefore rests disproportionately on the comic antics of its lead artists — Adam Sandler, Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage — to carry it through. They are not without their moments, but their goofiness works only in patches. Like in the sequences suggestive of a ménage-à-trois involving Dinklage, Serena Williams and Martha Stewart (in delightful cameo roles) in the Lincoln Room of the White House. Penelope Wilton as the gibberish-speaking British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher induces a few chuckles.
But what can one say of Adam Sandler? He has a laidback, laconic comedic style and can be amusing when he wants to be. But in Pixels , it’s almost like he’s sleepwalking his part as the geeky gamer whose ability at pattern-recognition, which takes him to the world gaming championship final, is summoned to save the world from an alien attack involving the entire universe of video game characters.
Director Chris Columbus (whose filmography ranges from Harry Potter to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York to Night at the Museum) is partial to scripts where children triumph over adults. Pixels , too, is a celebration of boys with toys. But it’s supremely unfunny. If the film and its cast collapsed in one pixelated heap, I couldn’t care less.
