From Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron to Jurassic World, Spy and Ant-Man, this summer’s rollout of blockbusters has been, to the surprise of this critic at least, creatively robust. It’s about time an expensive, unsalvageable bomb landed on a thousand screens and returned the blockbuster to its comfortable place of intellectual hollowness and artistic anemia. Chris Columbus’ Pixels, the latest vehicle for the forever growth-stunted Adam Sandler and Kevin James, fulfills these dubious expectations.
Produced by Sandler’s Happy Madison company, co-written by his regular collaborator Tim Herlihy, and adapted punishingly from a two-minute short film from 2010, Pixels conceives an admittedly novel form of alien invasion: Giant, pixilated characters from classic arcade games, who descend from the heavens to destroy global landmarks in acts of extraterrestrial aggression, while giving us humans three “lives,” or chances, to beat the “game.”
It all traces back to the events of the film’s prologue, set in 1982 — cue the awful haircuts, overused Queen on the soundtrack, and references to forgotten television stars — in which pubescent nerds compete for the country’s top prize in video gaming, with footage of their exploits to be shot into space in a NASA capsule as a form of cultural exchange for whatever species discovers it.
Decades later, these socially wayward teenagers with hyperadvanced prefrontal cortices are now schlubby middle-aged men, and the NASA capsule has reached an inevitably hostile species that takes their 8-bit bleeps and bloops as a declaration of war, develops its own destructive voxels of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Galaga and others, and begins a reign of terror no military can thwart without the help of the original geek squad from ’82: Sam Brenner (Sandler), a top gamer and divorcee now stuck in a dead-end career installing stereo equipment; Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad), a tech genius, conspiracy theorist and perpetual virgin; Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage), an egotistical, onetime gaming champion who has found himself in prison for telecom fraud; and Will Cooper (Kevin James), Sam’s best friend and milquetoast sideman who has nonetheless become — wait for it — president of the United States!
This is a man’s world, or rather a boy’s world, in which the fairer sex has no place. Michelle Monaghan is cast as a lieutenant colonel for DARPA, a job that requires brains and specialized skills, but her only job, once the pixels start to shower from the mother ship, is to stand beside Sam as his requisite love interest, look pretty in a dress, and exchange ostensibly spunky repartee with her future partner. Breathy and impossibly slim, she’s as much a hollow male fantasy as the seductive, sword-wielding videogame avatar of Ludlow’s unhealthy obsessions. But at least she’s given some direction; the inestimably hilarious Jane Krakowski is sequestered in the thankless role of President Cooper’s subservient wife and is granted just a handful of rote lines to make an impression. Even this beats Lainie Kazan’s unfortunate casting as Ludlow’s uncouth grandmother.
But Pixels is nothing if not an exercise in wasted potential. The concept of the movie is not inherently doomed, and it accrues its only mileage from its visuals, in which blurry digital visions from gaming’s golden age gleefully terrorize our physical world. Pac-Man, for instance, uses the grid formation of New York City as his familiar serpentine maze. The yellow sphere chomps down on cars and people with an insatiable uniformity while being chased by Sam and company, each of them controlling customized cars the color of the game’s ghosts.
The mind boggles at what someone like Edgar Wright or Brad Bird could accomplish with such a concept, but Sandler and James’ sense of humor is so dated and witless that their sensibility torpedoes the premise. These are guys who still find mullets and gay-panic jokes hysterical, where the height of visual comedy is a senior citizen obliviously dancing to an exercise tape while a computerized centipede crashes through her apartment and, naturally, stops to do some moves with her.
The comedy of Pixels never reaches anybody above a sixth-grade education, yet the movie is awash in ’80s nostalgia. One wonders if young people who find Sandler and James funny in 2015 will know who Donkey Kong is, let alone appreciate the elaborate strategies necessary to defeat Space Invaders or Arkanoid. The only satirical arrow that hits any kind of a target is James’ buffoonish, semi-illiterate president who, before he becomes the world’s savior, suffers poll numbers somewhere between Highly Disapprove and Ebola – an election-season forecast, perhaps, for a Donald Trump presidency.
PIXELS. Director: Chris Columbus; Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, Jane Krakowski, Brian Cox, Sean Bean; Distributor: Columbia; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area theaters