2015 - PIXELS, stunningly bad comedy

Invaders from outer space in the form of early arcade video games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders, for reasons to ridiculous to explain come to earth to destroy it.  Only some loser video game players from the 70's and 80's can stop them.

Why write about a film that was a critical and commercial flop?  Because it's yet another example of the downfall of Hollywood commercial film entertainment. The film is essentially a ripoff of Ghostbusters without any of the cleverness or humor that film had.  Pixels is so obviously trying to copy the Ghostbusters formula.  However the lack of humorous situations and characters completely kill this film. 

 

Adam Sandler's production company was behind the origin of this film.  The director Chris Columbus a one time protege of Steven Spielberg had clearly seen better days.  His specialty was making safe mainstream films like Mrs Doubtfire and Adventures in Babysitting.  Where he got in to trouble was when he took on projects like Rent and Bicentennial Man.  Clearly Pixels was an attempt at a mainstream action comedy with strong commercial potential.

What can you say about this cast? Adam Sandler plays the old slacker video game expert. His part was clearly modeled after Bill Murray but without the sly humor in Ghostbusters. A so called comedian named Josh Gad goes from one unfunny piece of business to another he is very tiresome and seems to be in every scene. They even have a computer character named Q Bert who is modeled after Slimer.  Michelle Monaghan has the thankless role as the romantic interest for Sandler.  There's even a little kid who is in the film to manipulate the audience's emotions. 

The computer generated special effects are good, but so what. The film was not the super box office success everyone was looking for and the critics deservedly killed it in the reviews.  As they say imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery, it's stealing.

The film was written (if that's the word) by Tim Herlihy and Tim Dowling,  The running time is 106 minutes,