I love video games. In fact, immersing myself in their digitised worlds, be they ancient or futuristic, is probably my favourite hobby. Considering the advances made in the graphics department in recent years, they share more similarities with movies than ever before.
It remains a constant source of personal disappointment, then, that the odds of a film adapted or inspired by video games being decent are longer than the possibility of the Millennium Falcon successfully navigating an asteroid field.
Add the perennially-unfunny Adam Sandler to the formula, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. How this guy is still employed I’ll never know, but I think his last decent movie preceded dinosaurs.
The genesis of Pixels began in 2010 as a short film on YouTube made by French freelance filmmaker Patrick Jean. It was only a couple of minutes long and featured classic video game characters attacking New York City and turning everything they touched into more pixels.
That couple of minutes is better than anything we see here. Hollywood, of course, snatched the premise up, casted the worst actor ever to grace the big screen as the lead and proceeded to trounce all over the good work and stretch it ridiculously thin over a two-hour period.
The story follows Sam Brenner (Sandler), who in the 1980s was the best kid in town at arcade machines, along with his buddies Cooper, Ludlow and Eddie ‘The Fire Blaster’ Plant (Dinklage).
Fast-forward to the present day, and the group work dead-end jobs and have no real prospects, except for Cooper who somehow becomes the President of the USA despite his lower-than-average intelligence.
Things become even more outlandish when intergalactic aliens see footage of an old 8-bit video game and mistake it as an act of aggression against their kind. What follows is a medley of famous video game characters such as Galaga, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong attacking Earth, and naturally Brenner and his mates are humanity’s only hope of survival.
Despite his pioneering name, director Chris Columbus doesn’t lead his audience to discover anything new or exciting here. It’s as run-of-the-mill as it gets, and assaulting our eyeballs with waves of colour that would make Van Gogh blush doesn’t disguise the film’s complete lack of energy or enthusiasm. Even the actors look bored out of their minds playing their roles, so heaven knows what we’re meant to feel watching it.
I’m not even going to repeat my criticisms of Sandler as it’d just be a rehash of my previous reviews of his films, but the other cast members fall considerably short too. Especially Dinklage.
Jokes aside, they all play tired caricatures – the bumbling oaf in a high position, the ‘lonely awkward virgin’, the over-sexualised non-entity female characters. You get the idea.
Pixels’ humour is almost as dated and irrelevant as the games it is based on, with awkward one-liners that had me burying my head in my popcorn-filled hands and ‘lad banter’ amongst the group that was just cringeworthy.
If there’s a saving grace to the film, it’s the visuals. Seeing whole cities turn into pixels and famous gaming characters brought to life in a giant way is pretty cool to see (the first time anyway, not by the end of the film when the same stuff is happening), and there’s one cool scene with Pac-Man and a bunch of MINI Coopers.
Ultimately though, there just isn’t enough here to justify a ticket. The characters are annoying and terribly acted, the humour is non-existent, all complemented by a plot that is stupid and inexorably dull. To better use your time, download and play these classic games on your computer, or better yet, dig out a copy of Wreck-It Ralph and see an extremely rare but brilliant example of how a proper video game movie should be done. For this isn’t it. Again.
*Showing at Cineco, Seef I and Saar
