Susan Granger’s review of “Pixels” (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Forget the hype! “Pixels” is just another stupid Adam Sandler man/child movie from Happy Madison Productions (“Jack and Jill,” “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”).
The visually inventive credits sequence introduces 13 year-old Sam Brenner (Anthony Ippolito) being defeated by mullet-wearing Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant (Andrew Bambridge) at the 1982 Worldwide Video Arcade Championships.
Skip ahead to present-day – with Brenner (Sandler) working as a Geek Squad-type home-video system installer, wearing a shirt emblazoned with “The Nerd.”
Suddenly, various historic sites around the world, including the Washington Monument and Taj Mahal, along with Manhattan and London, are under siege by giant, weaponized video-games like Pac-Man, Centipede and Donkey Kong.
As it turns out, when NASA sent a time capsule into outer space in 1982, it showed Sam and his pals playing video games, which intergalactic aliens interpreted as Earth’s declaration of war. According to the boorish President of the United States (Kevin James), only Sam and his cronies (Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage) can save the world. +
Written with a insouciantly sexist slant by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling and directed by Chris Columbus (“Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson” franchises), it also features Michelle Monaghan, Brian Cox, Sean Bean and Jane Krakowski – with cameos by Martha Stewart and Serena Williams.
What’s interesting is conjecture about why Sony cut a scene showing invaders blasting a hole in China’s Great Wall. In confidential Sony e-mails that were hacked and publicly released last year, Beijing’s Film Bureau members objected to any depiction of the destruction of one of their national treasures; apparently, Sony self-censored to pacify them.
The lesson: never underestimate the allure of the Chinese box-office, worth $4.8 billion in 2014, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Only 34 foreign films are released in China each year; 14 must be in ‘high’ tech formats like 3D or IMAX. And movie studios receive 25% of the box-office receipts.
Last November, Wang Fenglin, v-p of the China Film Producers Assoc., predicted that – within three years – the Chinese film market will overtake the United States as the largest in the world.
Meanwhile, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Pixels” is a toxic 3 – a sloppy, sci-fi comedy bust.
