The posters for Pixels are alluring, with characters from classic arcade games hovering over some of the world’s major cities. The most eye-catching one boasts a giant Pac-Man, mouth wide open, devouring San Francisco. What these adverts fail to get across is that Pixels is an Adam Sandler movie. Pity the poor souls who go into the comedy blockbuster thinking they’ve signed up to watch The Lego Movie by way of Independence Day. They’ll be disappointed.
Being a Sandler movie from the actor’s own Happy Madison Productions (responsible for dreck like Jack and Jill and Paul Blart: Mall Cop), Pixels is a casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric comedy, starring some of Sandler’s buddies. The only difference this time is that state-of-the-art CGI has been added to the mix.
Pixels starts out strongly with a visually inventive credits sequence that energetically sets up the backstory of Sandler’s character. The year is 1982, when arcade games like Donkey Kong and Centipede are all the rage. At the gaming world championships, 13-year-old prodigy Sam Brenner (Anthony Ippolito) goes up against Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant (Andrew Bambridge) and loses.
Fast forward to present-day, and Brenner (now played by Sandler) still hasn’t managed to shake his “loser” status. He’s working at a job he hates; meanwhile best childhood friend Will Cooper (Kevin James) has gone on to eclipse him, managing to become president of the United States, despite his inability to read.
In clunky fashion, in the midst of the audience getting to know these buffoons, a mysterious attack is made on a military base by what appear to be giant, glowing pixel cubes. It’s soon revealed that the violence is being inflicted by extraterrestrials, who intercepted a Nasa time capsule from the 1980s that contained copies of famous video games and interpreted them as a declaration of war. In their quest to take over planet Earth, the angry aliens send down giant-sized replicas of famous arcade game icons to obliterate the world. In his first smart decision as president, Cooper calls in Brenner to help.
The best bit in the film is given away in the trailer, with the Japanese inventor of Pac-Man trying to reason with his creation before getting his arm bitten off by the yellow menace. The rest of the action – directed with little flair by Chris Columbus, the director of the first two (and least inventive) Harry Potter movies – is rote, improved only by a hammy Brian Cox as a grumpy US admiral, and Peter Dinklage, who is clearly having a hoot as Brenner’s childhood nemesis, Plant.
There are women in the cast, although it’s clear watching Pixels that Sandler can’t work out what to do with them. As the president’s first lady, Jane Krakowski, who was recently nominated for an Emmy for her rapid-fire work in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is completely wasted, with barely a line of dialogue. Michelle Monaghan fares better with an actual character, but her army officer-turned-game player is treated with contempt by screenwriters Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling. It’s dispiriting to watch an actor as charismatic as Monaghan try to bring life to a script that vilifies her character after she turns down a kiss from Brenner, seconds after meeting him. Her character arc amounts to “bitch turned suitable love interest”.
Meanwhile, Sandler goes through the motions of playing the affable schlub at the center of the chaos. For fans of Sandler’s broad studio comedy, Pixels will go down easy. Everyone else should watch Patrick Jean’s ingenious short film that inspired Pixels. In just over two minutes, it accomplishes what Columbus’s blockbuster fails to do in almost two hours, in that it’s witty, inventive and smart.
• Pixels is released on 24 July in the US, 12 August in the UK and 10 September in Australia
