I swear to God, Adam Sandler will have his comeback comedy. He'll eventually give up his tired ways of trying so hard not to make us laugh that his big return will shock and awe the world. I don't know how long it will take. I don't know when it will happen. But, no matter how many shit blossom films he makes, there will be the one that defies all logic. I will continue to believe this until the day I die or Sandler retires from film due to the nut cancer he contracts as karma for taking so much money from so many people and returning with cankerous discharges he's called his films for the last decade. As much of a revelation as I'm sure it's going to be to you all... Pixels is not that film.
Pixels is awful. Like pulling out spinal fluid, but in an alley in Mexico awful. It's some of the laziest writing I've ever seen on screen. The writers took a great concept and assaulted it until it was beyond recognition. It might actually be harder to write a movie this lazy and incoherent than it would be to insert a single joke that lands in the entire film. You have to actually try to be this unfunny and this not clever. It's so lazy, in fact, it's like the writers had a giant poster on the wall in front of their computer screens as they were writing it that just read FUCK IT in giant letters and whenever they forgot about a plot point they needed to respond to or a joke they needed to make, they'd just look up at the poster and remind themselves that this isn't a movie... it's an Adam Sandler movie. It doesn't have to make sense (and it doesn't). It doesn't have to be funny (and it isn't). And it doesn't have to mean anything at all... because fuck it. The type of people who actively go out and see Adam Sandler movies, and not in the ironic sense, are the type of people whose life motto is fuck it.
As I sat in the theater I looked at my fellow patrons around me. There may have been about thirty people in my theater with the combined total IQ of seventeen. These are the people Sandler makes movies for... the people who still enjoy his movies. These are the type of people who see a sight gag or hear a joke and audibly repeat what was just said or seen out loud in laughing hysteria. I shit you not, there is a scene where Peter Dinklage and a pixelated Q-Bert are jumping on a trampoline and someone behind me says "Ha! Is that a trampoline?!" This is the kind of slack-jawed, shirt covered in drool, crotch sockets that still see Adam Sandler movies. And when the movie ended as I was finishing up writing my suicide note, these twenty-nine other souls that cannot be saved applauded. They clapped at a screen projecting a moving image of names scrolling up. Now, applauding in a movie theater urks me anyway, but this is Pixels. It could've been a dog searching for 100 minutes in a spot of grass where to take a meaty dump, finally deciding on the perfect spot, and the climax is letting it launch... and these morons would've stood up and clapped just the same. (In fact, if that had been the movie... it probably would've been a lot funnier.)
A recording of kids playing in a video game competition in 1982 was sent into space. In 2015, aliens who've made themselves into video games decide to come down to Earth to challenge us to those games (even though they didn't know they were games in the first place... fuck it) and if we don't win, then the Earth is destroyed. Why? Because fuck it. Adam Sandler is a man-child who is a self-proclaimed "nerd" even though the sort of nerd-bashing being done in this movie hasn't been even close to prevalent since the late 80s, but this is where Sandler's humor is perpetually stuck. His best friend is Kevin James who is actually the President of the United States... because fuck it. Then, Josh Gad is some freaky weirdo and Peter Dinklage who has debased himself in catastrophic ways is in this as well. There's one female in the entire movie (two if you count the pixelated woman who stops being pixelated and ends up disappearing, but Q-Bert changes into her later and is presented as a trophy because these writers are sexist idiots because, you guessed it, fuck it.) Sandler and the crew are good at video games and the aliens play by the rules so they have to defeat them. So, they create rays of light that can actually shoot at the aliens and this works on the first try because fuck it. Then they turn cars into "ghosts" to beat Pac-Man and this works because fuck it. Then a cheat code is entered (no explanation how because fuck it) and the aliens discover that we cheated and decide to destroy the Earth, but the boss of the ship gives us one last chance (he's Donkey Kong because fuck it) and Sandler ends up winning. Not because he defeats the aliens. But, because his long con of acting like he doesn't give a shit, making movie after movie and taking money from morons for so long... he wins.
I'm not talking about Sandler the actor. Sandler the actor has made some decent films as of late. I thoroughly enjoyed both The Cobbler and Men, Women and Children. Sandler the star of Happy Madison productions (a byproduct of Fuck It Inc.) is stuck in this pattern of regressing into a seven year old whose jokes are the equivalent of pointing and laughing at someone falling down. While comedy has evolved, Sandler has devolved. Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, Big Daddy... these are classic movies with actual humor and story and character and heart. Grown Ups, Jack and Jill, Blended... these aren't funny. It was funny to think of thirty different ways to use the word 'snob' as an insult to someone back in the early 90s (maybe) but here it's just plain childish. It's weird that he's got this power over people that no matter who is in his movies or responsible for his movies succumb to the debasing level of Sandler humor. I mean, the film was directed by Chris Columbus. This is the man that brought us Adventures in Babysitting, Gremlins, The Goonies, Mrs. Doubtfire, and freaking Home Alone! You obviously know what it is to make a great film... how have you been turned this late in your career by Adam Sandler and the fuck it mantra?
Inherently, the biggest problem with Pixels is
Fuck it.
D-
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