Pixels – 3/10 – The heroes of our most remembered video games invade Earth in a plot by alien planets for world domination. As kids in 1982, Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler), Will Cooper (Kevin James), Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad), and Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant (Peter Dinklage) competed in the Arcade World Championships. Now, they’re going to do it on a grander scale. When intergalactic aliens discover video feeds of classic arcade games and misinterpret them as a declaration of war, they attack the Earth, using the video games as the models for their assaults, and now-U.S. President Cooper must call on his old-school arcade friends to save the world from being destroyed by PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Centipede, and Space Invaders. Joining them is Lt. Col. Violet Van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), a specialist supplying the arcaders with unique weapons to fight the aliens. ‘Pixels’ gave me a bad feeling from the very minute i saw the first trailer in January of this year. It’s safe to say that my worries were of legitimate concers, as this movie is terrible. Sandler has gained a reputation for his lazy roles in movies that lack any comedic intelligence, but this film is among the very worst. It’s not quite as bad as ‘Jack and Jill’, but ‘Pixels’ packs plenty of reasons for this failed experiment to be easily forgotten. The premise itself is solid enough that with a great direction the movie could’ve prospered in it’s personable plot that felt very stretched throughout the film. It all feels like a collection of scenes that are conveniently used alongside of a video game reference that will make braindead audience members applaud in nostalgic tingles. Perhaps my greatest problem with the film came in it’s lack of logic in many aspects of the events surrounding the film. First of all, to believe that aliens invading the Earth will stop if they lose three out of five video game challenges is laughable enough, but Kevin James playing the president of the United States is downright chair beating chuckles. Never during the film does his performance remotely resemble presidential stature. All jokes aside, he can’t read or pronounce big words, so how the hell did this guy win the presidency? Perhaps the citizens of this world are just as dumb and rude as the stars of this movie. On the subject of the latter, Sandler is once again downright despicable. He is so uninterested in the playing of this movie that he often feels like he is squeezing out a line of dialogue for another unwarranted payday. The same rules apply for him in this film that they do in every other Sandler film; 1. He’s a jerk, 2. He’s appealing to female actresses who are 100 times more out of his league, and 3. We are supposed to appreciate and accept everything said in the first two rules. He nor the movie are funny even in the remote sense. As bad as Sandler is, he is a fairytale compared to Gaad’s awful performance. He seems to think that yelling every line equals laughs, but his schtick gives the movie that immature feel left by a lack of Nick Swardson and other of Sandler’s friends dancing for a paycheck. I laughed a couple of times in the movie, but they were more for the quick two second pity laughs. Nothing ever of gut busting dialogue is presented. If i did appreciate anything from Chris Columbus’s script, it was the design of the pixels, as well as the soundtrack. Like many Sandler films, this movie is a tribute to 80’s pop culture, as well as the music that defined a decade. It’s all appropriatly used for a complete sound worthy of the arcade era. ‘Pixels’ is a 93 minute waste of film that falls flat on it’s humor, as well as lacks any structural storytelling. It’s aimed at one decade of filming, all the while alienating the current generation of gamers who invest more money than ever for their style of gaming. It’s hard to even recommend this film for kids because the characters in the video game world were way before their time. The movie feels like a Syfy Sharknado presentation without the laughable charm. This is a movie that should’ve appealed to me a lot more than it did, because of these games being such huge stables in my childhood. Instead, this movie, like many crumbled game machines, should be unplugged from it’s power source.