Somebody out there owes me one. Think a wookiee life debt,
but in reverse; far from saving my life, they owe me for the time I lost this
week that I could have used doing something productive like jamming masonry
nails into the soft parts between my toes, or finally getting round to writing
that letter to JJ Abrams telling how much of a hack I think he is and how he
ought to just not, please. Thanks.
I’m not unaccustomed to wasting hours of my life on movies,
we’ve all been there. I’m also not unaccustomed to everyone having their own
opinions and I’m quite happy to discuss, argue, disagree, and engage in deadly
combat over people’s wide and varied tastes. It’s an entirely different story
when my natural instincts tell me that a movie is going to be gash and someone
tells me otherwise. I can’t remember who it was who had the sheer gall to look
me in the eyes and tell me that Pixels wasn’t as bad a movie as it looked, but
whoever it was; there is a special circle of hell reserved for you my friend, somewhere
between the guy who does those “Everything wrong with…” YouTube clips and
whoever gave Paul Feig a career.
Adam Sandler hasn’t been funny in years, neither as an
actor, scriptwriter or producer. Happy Gilmour and The Waterboy are really his
only movies I can stomach and they are genuinely funny. The Wedding Singer isn’t
really a favourite of mine truth be told, but I understand why people enjoy it;
it has its moments. Objectively though he hasn’t done anything worth watching
since the late nineties at best so you have to start wondering if he’s even a
draw anymore. It’s probably not a coincidence that he can’t consistently get
movies into theatres so signed an exclusive deal (and more recent extension)
with Netflix to distribute his crapfests which resulted in (amongst other
triumphs) The Ridiculous 6, a Western comedy more notorious for the fact the
Native American extras walked off the set due to the script and Sandler’s
insensitive and frankly racist handling of anyone who wasn’t Caucasian. So you can
probably take a guess why I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about Pixels. That
and it’s blatantly stolen.
Futurama is one of the best cartoon series out there, at
very least for the first four seasons. Nothing’s ever quite the same after it
gets cancelled, but those first four seasons were gold. I’m going to go out on
a limb and say better than The Simpsons, but that’s a whole other kettle of
three-eyed fish. If you’re not familiar, Futurama did an episode with exactly
this plot: aliens shaped like video games attack the Earth and Fry uses his
video game skills to fight of the invading 8bit hordes. In fact it was part of
an anthology episode, so 13 years ago Matt Groening and his team deemed there
to be anywhere between 5 and 8 minutes worth of material in this bit, let alone
the hour and three quarters we have here. The question then is how do you draw
a really simple premise out into a full-blown movie? Evidently by wheeling out
a Donkey Kong barrel full of clichés, tropes and similar hackneyed crap.
Sandler, as always is our unlikely hero. The second best
arcade player in the world we discover, in an opening so full of awkward
foreshadowing it may as well call itself a clairvoyant and hustle you out of
all your cash, your watch and possibly even the shirt off your back. Fast-forward
30 years and Sandler is a nerd installing TVs and his best mate is the President
of the US, although randomly still able to hang out with his buddies and invite
them round to the White House for laughs. It also appears that he grew up with
some wildly chauvinistic tendencies which I’m sure the female lead won’t come
to find endearing eventually. Ahem. Spoiler alert: you have seen this movie a
thousand times before behind a thousand different skins. It’s accidentally meta
for that fact; I don’t think it was designed to mimic video game franchises
that give you “new” characters which are just old characters with beards. This is
just another Adam Sandler movie with a beard. Only this beard is Pacman.
You already know how this turns out. They assemble the old
crew, including the guy who beat our protagonist’s high score as a kid, they
fight the aliens despite the Army thinking they know best, something goes
wrong, Michelle Monaghan’s kid is taken by the aliens as a trophy yada yada. There
are a couple of things though, that even with the best will in the world and
suspension of disbelief are just plain bullshit.
First of all, a big part of the whole conceit is the
nefarious use of cheat codes. Now I can understand that you might be able to
enter something like the Konami code into an arcade machine (even though I’ve
never heard of it on anything other than home consoles) although I’m fairly
sure at a Worldwide Championship Event being videoed for the ages, it’d be
fairly easy to notice someone randomly jamming directions into the credit
screen. What I don’t understand is how you enter a cheat code into a completely
non-product placement related Mini. Moreover I don’t know how they had the
arcane knowledge enough to predict that they’d be required to be the ghosts in
Pacman and retrofit four conveniently coloured Mini’s with exactly the gear
they’d need to win or have the conveniently place creator of Pacman on standby
for basically one crap gag. So much ex machine going on it’s almost like they
couldn’t be bothered to actually script out a plot.
The other thing I’m really not sure about is why Peter Dinklage
spends the entirety of his adult appearance here talking like a horrendous
gangsta stereotype. If he’d have come out of jail still talking like it was the
80s that would have made sense, but why is he a talking like a cut price Mr T?
It’s like the writers took lessons from the hacks behind Transformers and
skipped the racial sensitivity training at work. Eventually all’s well that
ends well. Sandler gets the girl, the world is saved, and one of the other
nerds sets himself on a weird sexual relationship with an alien who originally
looked like Q*Bert. Yeah, this blog genuinely keeps making me write sentences I
never thought I would.
I’d be completely unsurprised to find out this turd-pile never came
close to making its budget back, just as I’m unsurprised that want but I’ll
never get my one hour forty five minutes back. It’s probably a good job I can’t
remember who recommended Pixels to me; if you’re reading this though… you owe
me.
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