Regular readers of these pages will know how loudly I kick and scream and bitch and moan whenever the subject of Woody Allen’s ongoing creative bankruptcy comes up, but the Woodster’s shortcomings in his hastening, deepening, darkening dotage are as nothing to those of Adam Sandler. Sandler reached the bottom of the bottom of the barrel long ago, yet he has always acted – and been remunerated – as if said destination were the summit of Everest. I skipped Woody’s latest, Irrational Man, mainly because life’s just too short, but for the benefit of my beloved readers I stood firm and intrepid on the battlefield and took the blunt force of Sandler’s latest fiasco full in the face. You’re welcome!
Pixels sits about where you’d expect it in the flatlining, Hades-bound trajectory of Sandler’s creative arc: That’s My Boy, Jack And Jill, Blended... downward and downward in the widening gyre, indeed. There are some differences: Sandler’s in-house hack Dennis Dugan isn’t at the helm this time, but any relief to be derived from that absence vanishes when you learn that his replacement is satanic studio drudge Chris Columbus, no doubt bussed in to take care of the only thing that actually works in Pixels, the computer graphics and digital effects.
What hasn’t changed is the usual low-brow, high-concept pitch: remember Click and Jack And Jill and their three-word pitches, one of which was probably “Sandler”? Here, aliens have retro-engineered a bunch of 1980s video games, such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, into the means with which to occupy and subdue planet Earth, which is forced to call upon the talents of an ageing group of 80s arcade-rats – Sandler et al – to see off the invader.
Obviously, this depends upon one’s enthusiasm for arcade games and the 1980s, and – full disclosure – I don’t mind arcade games (or didn’t when I was 20) but would prefer to have lived through the 80s in a medically induced coma. That leaves the comedy, and here the pickings are terribly slim, creepily tinged with misogyny and racism, overly broad and irritatingly loud.
This leaves Sandler, whose appeal has always been a mystery to me, as not much more than the lowest-hanging fruit pilfered from the Tree of Jerry Lewis (and none of the high-hanging Frank Tashlin-style stuff that the French quite rightly admire); lots of sad little boy voices interspersed with violent temper tantrums, and a surfeit of suburban brattiness. To me, it’s partly a grim foretaste of the comedic “Ow, my balls!” crap you see on TV in Idiocracy and partly just the waste byproduct of the first amendment. Stunt-casting gave Sandler his only artistic highlights – Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People – but, left to his own devices, all we get is the laziness and imaginative impotence that Pixels embodies all too well.
