He also is allowed to have a song and dance number sure to maintain the Gen-X flashbacks this whole enterprise is built on, while simultaneously giving kids in the audience their eureka moment of “hey, that’s Olaf!”
the world’ overtones to life with his happy-go-lucky paranoia. Gad, who’s rarely met an awkward, endearing creeper that he’s shied away from, brings some of the introverted ‘nerds vs. While it’s just another day at the office for Sandler and James, Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage, newcomers to this formula, have a blast slumming it with the material. Which is not to say that all the jokes and comedy beats are as leaden as the lead performance. Indeed there’s plenty of lip-service about him being a 40-something schlub who needs to get his act together, but it’s still the same dog and pony show of phoned in immaturity and smiling grade school misogyny that we’ve endured for some time now. Lacking the grace of even a cutely cameoing Q*bert, he offers the same Billy Madison performance that he’s been giving for 20 years, only the movie itself is now also aware at how truly boring this has become. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), because she didn’t want to kiss him when they first met, which makes her like totally stuck-up.Īnd with familiar beats like that, Pixels’ brand of Happy Madison humour flushes away the goodwill earned by its goofy premise.Īs the lead, Sandler is less animated than his CGI co-stars in more than one way. military’s gaming defence, placing him in a position to also bring up conspiracy theory gamer Ludlow (Josh Gad), and a now imprisoned and adult ‘Fire Blaster’ (Peter Dinklage). So, when aliens in the form of 1980s arcade games attack, President Cooper, played with solid restraint by James, raises his old chum to a position of power. Yet, he remains best buddies with his childhood pal, Will Cooper (Kevin James), who incidentally is now President of the United States. Apparently, this shame caused him to grow into a 40-something ‘Nerd Driver’. They even recreated the pixel glories of these images into beautiful 3D CGI-life.Īlready a sweetly asinine concept, the sweetness drops when we meet the purported hero of the story, Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler) a one-time arcade child prodigy until he came in second place at a national tournament to his archrival, Eddie Plant, aka Fire Blaster. Sadly, aliens took this as a declaration of war, and created engines of death in the countenance of our favourite games: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Galaga, and more. When Pixels embraces this unapologetic longing for the time where gaming was still a social activity to every school kid and clique, it is as unthreateningly amusing as the pixelated CG-visage of a giant Pac-Man tearing up New York, or Donkey Kong towering in 3D.Īlmost an experiment in splicing Roland Emmerich movies and Buzzfeed articles, the set-up to Pixels makes kooky enough sense: 33 years ago, NASA sent to space a video about American culture, which included images from 1982 arcade games. For a story ostensibly about an alien invasion, even the antagonistic threats and demands come in the guise of faded VHS recordings from Madonna’s early MTV interviews. And now? Pixels is offering an invitation engraved in eight-bit.Įssentially a selective memory time capsule, this action-packed comedy and pseudo-epic is blinged out in 80s euphoria for the arcade games of the past, as well as a kind of catch-all of Generation X touchstones.
The decade that gave us dayglo and Mario, shoulder-pad fashion and Pac-Man, still looms large for both the generation that grew up in that time and everyone else who wishes they could at least visit. But there still must be something said about the 80s.
#Pixel movie reviews for kids full#
Judging by recent box office receipts, 1990s nostalgia is in full force.