Pixels (2015) • View trailer
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for occasional vulgarityBy Derrick Bang
Movies emerge from all sorts of
sources.
Back in the Golden Age,
adaptations came exclusively from popular novels and the theater stage. As we
moved into the television age, iconic network characters leaped to the big
screen, and then the dam truly burst, with high-concept projects concocted from
songs, comic books, board games, computer games and even theme park
attractions.
 |
With Earth under attack by rather strange invaders, our heroes — from left, Violet
(Michelle Monaghan), Brenner (Adam Sandler) and Ludlow (Josh Gad) — confront one
crazy opponent after another. And yes, that's Q*bert on the far right: apparently on the
side of the angels. |
Most of those latter efforts, it
must be mentioned, didn’t amount to much. No surprise there: Novels and plays
contain rich narrative material constructed by writers who devoted a great deal
of care to nit-picky details like plot logic and character development. Computer
games offer little more than pop-culture images. (Anybody remember enduring Super Mario Bros.? Or either of the two Mortal Kombat bombs?)
Pixels derives from a 2010 short film of the same title by French writer/director Patrick Jean. It’s readily available via
YouTube, Vimeo and various other Internet sources, and I heartily recommend the
experience. It’s far more satisfying, at slightly more than 2 minutes (!), than
this 98-minute, big-screen exercise in brain-dead chaos.
Scripters Tim Herlihy and Timothy
Dowling clearly borrowed heavily from the original Ghostbusters template, while acknowledging the current resurgence
of interest in early-gen computer games such as Asteroids and Pac-Man.
But the Ghostbusters riffs are
strongest, down to our heroes’ similar uniforms and even stance, while using
similar high-tech weapons to battle this story’s unlikely celestial invaders.
The presence of Dan Aykroyd, in
an early scene, suggests his approval of this acknowledgment of past glories.
Trouble is, Ghostbusters was a vastly superior film, with a much
better-developed storyline. Pixels is
random and clumsy, its under-developed characters graceless and often left to
stand about, as if wondering what to do next. The overall narrative is so
poorly executed that it frequently feels as if different sets of writers
contributed various scenes, leaving director Chris Columbus to stitch things
together.
A task at which he failed.
I had to remind myself that
Columbus helmed iconic films such as Home
Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, the first
two Harry Potter entries and the big-screen version of Rent. Then again, Columbus also brought us lesser efforts such as Bicentennial Man and I Love You, Beth Cooper, so he’s not immune to errors in judgment. Or skill.
But Pixels, without question, is the nadir of his (thus far) 30-year
career.
Which is a shame, because this
film’s first act shows promise. A 1982 prologue introduces us to young gamers
Brenner (Anthony Ippolito) and Cooper (Jared Riley), who marvel at the delights
to be found within their town’s first video game emporium. Their tag-along
younger friend, Ludlow (Jacob Shinder), is content to fall in love/lust with a pixilated
ninja babe dubbed Lady Lisa.
Brenner proves to be a natural,
working his way up to a championship match against an arrogant young visitor
named Eddie (Andrew Bambridge), who has dubbed himself “The Fire-Blaster.” The
match is filmed, with the footage inserted by NASA into a deep-space probes:
one of many examples, to entities Out There, of what Earth is like at that
moment in time.
Flash-forward to the modern day.
Cooper (now Kevin James) has, rather unexpectedly, become President of the
United States. (One wonders who was inept enough to have lost that election.) He’s a meatball best
known for embarrassing photo ops, but James nonetheless makes him somewhat
endearing, in an oafish way.
Ludlow (Josh Gad) has become a
conspiracy theory whacko (“Kennedy fired first!”) who still carries a torch for
the imaginary Lady Lisa. Brenner (Adam Sandler) has blossomed into the ultimate
under-achiever, as a roving tech nerd who installs home entertainment systems.
In that capacity, Brenner
encounters Violet (Michelle Monaghan), a recently jilted wife, and her young
son, Matty (Matt Lintz). The subsequent meet-cute connection is mutual all around,
and also endearing: further proof that Sandler, when held in check, can be
goofily charming while still delivering one-line zingers.
But there’s no time to explore
romantic possibilities, thanks to a crisis that erupts halfway around the
world, as a U.S. military base is attacked by free-flying whatzits that emit
laser-like bursts which transform everything — buildings, people, the landscape
— into small, multi-colored cubes of various sizes.
The assault is accompanied by a
weird musical fanfare that Cooper immediately recognizes, when he views footage
of the event. He summons Brenner to be sure, and they agree: Earth has just
been attacked by the fictitious entities of the early 1980s computer game Galaga.
Ludlow supplies the next
essential bit of information, rather mysteriously inserted into an old VHS tape
he’d been watching. (No cable or satellite channels in his house; that’s how the government monitors people!) Apparently,
that 1982 NASA tape was intercepted by an alien race that viewed the gaming
footage as an act of war, and has created warriors based on those games, and
sent them to Earth. The “rules” are spelled out by re-created video manifestations
of characters from early 1980s TV shows.
It’s a duel to potential planetary
destruction, with Earth granted three “lives,” as in classic arcade games.
We’ve already lost the first life, and of course we lose the second after an
assault in India, nobody having believed our heroes.
Then, finally acknowledging the
inevitable, the first fair-fight clash takes place in England’s Hyde Park, with
our newly jump-suited “Arcaders” taking on the rapidly descending Centipede. And, oh yes, it proves a fair
fight thanks to weapons hastily devised by the tech wizards at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where — imagine the coincidence! —
Violet happens to be a lieutenant colonel.
The old “gang” is fully assembled
with the arrival of the smarmy and larcenous Eddie (Peter Dinklage), rescued
from a long prison stretch and promised various things if he’ll help.
Which is right about the point
that Columbus loses any semblance of control over this whacked-out storyline.
The second act is bonkers, but at least visually impressive; effects supervisor
Matthew Butler enthusiastically embraced the challenge of bringing all these
1980s video games into our real world. He and production designer Peter Wenham
definitely hold our attention, even as things become progressively sillier.
The third act, however, defies
description.
By this point, Herlihy and
Dowling have abandoned any effort at coherence; they just toss stuff into the
mix, like spaghetti hurled against a wall, to see if anything will stick.
Brian Cox and Sean Bean wander
aimlessly through a few scenes, as a belligerent American admiral and an
equally confrontational British SAS officer. The DARPA tech team includes a
glass-brained android (Tom McCarthy) who’s just sorta taken for granted, as if
such a breakthrough were commonplace.
Ludlow naturally comes face to
face with an evil electronic personification of his beloved Lady Lisa (Ashley
Benson), but what happens next is
eye-rolling even by this numb-nuts film’s standards. An inappropriately chatty
Q*bert, presented to our heroes as a “trophy,” seems oddly benevolent, given
that he (it?) is a typical (?) denizen of this marauding alien race.
And if you expect any answers,
after the final climactic battle, forget it; Herlihy and Dowling don’t even try
to wrap things up. The final half hour is simply a mess.
Sandler holds things together as
well as possible, and his calm, decent-guy charisma is a welcome counterpoint
to — as the most obvious example — Gad’s overly shrill, shrieking handling of
Ludlow. Eddie’s vulgar tendencies are wholly out of place in this dumb but
mostly good-natured fantasy, with Dinklage’s earthy dialogue solely responsible
for the otherwise harmless script’s PG-13 elements. The character simply
doesn’t work, nor can Dinklage save him.
Lintz, also refreshingly serene,
shares several engaging scenes with Sandler. Jack Fulton gets a hearty laugh as
a young British lad who uncorks a choice one-liner. Jane Krakowski is
completely wasted as Cooper’s wife, and thus the U.S. First Lady; Lainie Kazan
has an equally useless role as Ludlow’s grandmother. Serena Williams and Martha
Stewart appears as themselves. (Don’t ask.)
And — could it really be? — yes,
Matt Frewer gets another shot at his own bit of 1980s pop-culture glory.
I’m intrigued by this film’s
proximity to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph,
which also gave fresh life to characters from long-dormant games such as BurgerTime, Paperboy, Dig Dug and,
yes, Q*bert. Indeed, little Q*bert is
more easily recognized today, than he was three decades ago. Nostalgia sure
takes us in strange directions.
A condensed and more
intelligently scripted version of these events would have made a great
45-minute episode of the recent TV series Warehouse
13. But at more than twice that length, Columbus’ film loses its way — and
its audience — long before its looney-tunes denouement. This is brain-dead,
flashy Hollywood trash at its worst: every bit as mindless as the phosphor-dot
spaceships that marched down the screen during a round of Space Invaders.
And not nearly as much fun.
