Ok, thread-pump, sorry, but saw the movie this afternoon mostly out of curiosity and from the things I've heard about it, so thought I'd chime in. Usually for movies that've been out for a while I won't go "full review" on, but for this movie I've quite a bit to say.
Pixels
My Grade: B- .... Barely
As noted earlier in this thread I didn't have good hopes for this movie and the more and more trailers I saw for it the less my my hopes were increased. So at least that's something, go into a movie with little to no hope and it's hard to be disappointed.
Someone above said that they don't so easily dismiss a movie based on who's in it, but -for me- it's easy to do that when the person your dismissal is based on his pretty much continually let you down in movie-making.
And for me, that person is Adam Sandler. I used to find his movies funny but they haven't been for over a decade as he's pretty much been doing the same thing he did in 1999. Well, we're not playing Pogs or feeding our Tamagotchi pets anymore, so why is he still doing the same humor? Sure, some humor is timeless. Slapstick, prat-falls, jokes on miscommunication, stuff like that will always be funny. But somehow the type of humor Sandler does isn't as timeless. And when I saw that Sandler's company "Happy Madison" was a part of this movie I feared that's what it'd be. A lot of Sandler cliches I've not laughed at since George Bush's first term in office.
Luckily it would seem in this movie Sandler's/Happy Madison's influence isn't too great here as it avoids most of the Sandler tropes, but there's still fragments of it there and the movie is unable to settle on a tone. One moment it tries to be serious and in the next cut it's wacky. It gives a serious scene with the characters being normal and then we get a scene of a character cliche obsessing over a female computer game character from nearly 30 years ago.
The movie shows us Sandler's character as young man who's very good at old video-arcade game cabinets; so good he's able to enter a national championship along with his best friend, while there he sort-of runs into a socially awkward guy and, why the hell not, he's a friend too now.
Sandler's character has been able to figure out and memorize the patterns of the classic 80s platformer games and ties with another video-game champ in the competition. The two square-off in a final battle with the game "Donkey Kong" and Sandler's character loses to Peter Dinklage.
Flash-forward to present day and Sandler is working for Not!GeekSquad and is sent on a job to install a home entertainment system at a home that just happens to be lived in by a gorgeous woman and recent divorcee. He bonds with her pre-teen son and even manages to bond some-what with her before both are called away.
Turns out she's a high-ranking military advisor for the President and the President turns out to be Sandler's childhood, and adulthood, BFF and he's also called to the White House too.
Aliens have attacked a military base and while Sandler thinks the aliens are attacking with video-game recreations, the military brass is less convinced and he's sent away. He then encounters the other friend from the tournament who's full conspiracy-nut and finds an encoded message sent by the aliens, with them pretty much saying they took a rocket sent with video game footage as a challenge. They're attacking the Earth with recreations of video-games and the Earth has three-chances to win the games (because in old video games you got three lives, get it? and prevent Earth's destruction. Eventually Sandler, his conspiracy nut BFF and even Dinklage are called in to defeat the aliens since they seem to be the only ones able to because the military has been ineffective.
And, really, on the whole.... The idea holds up. There's inconsistencies here and there with how things behave (particularly the Greebles that comprise the video-game recreations) but the action set-pieces are actually pretty fun. And there's even some character scenes that work out pretty good here and there.
But then there's odd stuff thrown in, Dinklage's character is released from prison and one of his conditions to help the government is a three-some with Martha Stewart and Serena Williams in the Lincoln Bedroom. Which.... okay. It's an odd thing thrown in for the hell of it.
The "geek" character is an over-the-top conspiracy wacko who occasionally seems to go Tourette's (Bizarre Variant) at times and is still obsessed with this female video-game character decades later.
Kevin James is Sandler's BFF and he's the President of the United States which... Okay. *Might* be acceptable but he's constantly shown to be an utter buffoon one wonders how he not only became wealthy enough to have the millions of dollars it takes to run for president (or to woo supporters) but managed to hold any public office on the road to becoming president. But... Then again, Donald Trump is polling well.
Tonal aspects of the movie are all over the place and one of the bigger plot points comes out of nowhere. It turns out Dinklage's character didn't genuinely win at that tournament in 1980-whatever, he inputed a cheat-code into the cabinet that he etched into the upper rim of sun-glasses. (A cheat-code that looks more like the "gravity-equation" from interstellar than it does something you'd input into an arcade machine with only a joystick and a handful of buttons.) He some-how uses this cheat-code in the real world to win at one of the alien's challenges, which pisses the aliens off. How he's able to input this cheat-code into the real world to be able to -seemingly- teleport his car in order to corner Pac-Man during that sequence goes unexplained.
But, overall, I will say the movie isn't terrible. Sandler is perfectly tolerable in it and doesn't rely on his usual Sandler-Antics, though there's hints of him in there but it's nothing too bad. Dinklage is a saving grace in this movie even though he's neutered quite a bit. James is.... Kevin James. He does good but the idea of him being President is pretty damn absurd.
Oh, our fat-kid character's love for the female game-character apparently doesn't go un-noticed by the aliens as she comes to attack him at one point. Up until that point in the movie all video-game aspects have been represented as pixelated blobs of incoherence. Looking like their 8-bit counterparts. But when we meet this woman she starts off pixelated (with smaller pixels than every other thing had) but soon resolves into looking like a normal person. ..... ?!
I dunno, it's not a *bad* movie and it doesn't suffer too much from Sandler's involvement but it seems like something more could have been done here. Some tonal aspects smoothed out better some tightening of the characters to better-fit the premise of this world. (Seriously, Kevin James pretty much plays an amalgamation of every character he's ever done and we're supposed to take him seriously as the President of the United States.) The romance is also sloppy too. She spurns Sandler after the two have a heart-to-hear conversation and suddenly he hates her and finds her nuts, only for it to all quickly turn around after they have a figurative dick-measuring contest over who's more important to the president. The action pieces are actually pretty fun, the visual representation of the games and such are actually fairly creative and there's threads of things to like here in any "arc" there is with Sandler's character and Dinklage.
It's not a terrible shit-fest like most Sandler movies these days (That's My Boy), it's not even as bad as I thought it would be. Is it good? Eh, I'd land on a "sorta." Worth seeing? Maybe, a RedBox/Amazon Prime rental or whatever you kids do these days.
But, I'd say the movie "met" my expectations. It didn't exceed them and it didn't fall short of them. It's sort of like eating at McDonald's. Going in you know what to expect and it's not likely to knock you over with greatness. At least it's not like Grownups 2 and you find a used bandaid under the bun.
