Ludlow, Eddie and Lady Lisa are down on Earth fending
off the hundreds of video game characters attacking Washington, while Sam,
Violet, Will and Q*Bert are in the spaceship in the final challenge set by the
aliens. It’s of course none other than Donkey Kong. 25M, to be precise; the
first level.
Donkey Kong tosses the blue barrel and flames erupt
behind the team, and Q*Bert pisses on the floor in fear. Great start for Part 5,
huh? Humiliation of a beloved video game character, right off the bat! DK
starts sending more barrels down at the Arcaders, and they jump from a floor to
the next, helping each other in climbing up. Q*Bert gets flattened by a barrel,
but he’s fine. Sam picks up a hammer and starts smashing, but the barrels have
become too frequent and too fast for him. He says he can’t win, he couldn’t
even beat Eddie back in ’82! That’s when Matty reveals that Eddie cheated back
then, so Sam really IS the great Donkey Kong champion – he went as far as Eddie
without cheating, so he was the better player! (That is, of course, if you want
to buy in this movie’s plot point that games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man have
cheat codes, which is bullshit in real life.)
Sandler gets going! That can't end well. |
I would like to remind you that Violet has never showed such amazing physical prowess anywhere earlier in the film, so this comes out of nowhere. |
It admittedly looks cool, but the three heroes in this scene are a cheating jackass, an annoying conspiracy theorist, and a silent woman who only exists to be eye candy. So... not really cool. |
You can kill DK? Without making him fall to his death? What, do you think this is a normal platformer? |
"I know you've done almost nothing in this climax, mister President, but here, let me hug you and get in another dig at Barack Obama." |
I would say that it's sad, but we never really had a chance to learn anything about Lady Lisa since she was a flat character made just so Josh Gad's character could have a romantic interest. |
*waves middle fingers up and down angrily at this goddamn scene and the extreme sexism of it* |
No! Don't! You are kissing ADAM SANDLER! Your career will be ruined! |
Ludlow is sad because he lost his voiceless girlfriend
from an alien world and cannot celebrate like the others. That’s when Q*Bert,
fan-preferred character in the film, suddenly has spasms. He unforms, his
voxels shift and take shape and change color. Is he evolving like a Pokémon?
No! He turns into... Lady Lisa.
Nopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenope |
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
This movie can suck on a Hepatitis-flavored ice pick.
This movie can go die in a fire and be reborn imperfectly by a Level 1
necromancer. This movie can get stuck in World -1 for eternity. This movie can
be uploaded in an old arcade machine close to irremediable computer death. This
movie could be neuralyzed out of the consciousness of all mankind and it would
be for the greater good.
So yeah, Ludlow gets his love back, the voiceless
pretty woman who has no personality and instantly fell in love with him. And it
used to be Q*Bert, who was the best thing in the film up to that point. Fuck this.
I could say I don’t want to continue, but it’s almost over. Even Sandler points
it out: “No one else is weirded out by this? That was just Q*Bert!”
President Will Cooper, whose ratings are now through
the roof, and he holds a press conference in which he announces his peace
treaty with the aliens and congratulates the Arcaders for winning the war. We
get a shot of Professor Iwatani’s hand being restored, so we can assume that
they are repairing some of the damage they’ve caused, although we aren’t told
if they ever brought back to life anyone who was turned into cubes by their
attacks on the world… Nor are we ever told if those people literally erased
from existence by Tetris came back somehow.
Cut to one year later, in the Lamonsoff household, in which we see pictures of Ludlow and Lisa after their marriage – that was
Q*Bert! – and a happy Josh Gad announcing, “Hey kids! Daddy’s home!” Cut to a
crib containing FIVE Q*Berts jumping in joy, yelling “Daddy! Daddy!”
FUCK YOU MOVIE FUCK YOU MOVIE FUCK YOU MOVIE!
FUCK YOU MOVIE!
Not feeling very articulate in response to your sheer
awfulness, but this says everything: FUCK YOU MOVIE!
Tabarnak.
(For the record, the ending credits re-tell the events of the story with 8-bit graphics, and it's actually better than the goddamn movie.)
Yep, the movie would have been better as an 8-bit short. Which... they include in the film! Should I have reviewed that instead? |
Are there good things I can tell about the film? Yes.
Fairness forces me to be honest and say that it’s not 100% crap. It’s got
decent special effects, it’s fun to see our childhood arcade and gaming icons
on film, and there are great tracks accompanying the better scenes – especially
the orchestral We Will Rock You. Peter Dinklage is fun here, even if he plays a
dickhead, he doesn’t take the film seriously and just hams it up freely. Kevin James is actually decent as President Will Cooper, for most of the film anyway. He approaches the situation seriously, first with skepticism before the aliens are properly revealed, later by helping as much as he can against the threat. The
premise in general is fun and could have made for a good, or at least decent,
movie. Emphasis on “could”; now here's why the film is shit.
First off, outside of Plant and Cooper, there are few likable characters in the
main cast. Sam Brenner is supposed to be the dogged nice guy who hasn’t really
changed since his teenage years because of his greatest failure in 1982, and we
should root for him. However, he has a despicable sense of humor, when he starts
winning he’s prone to belittling others as much as they used to belittle him
earlier, and he never really improves as a character. And despite this, he ends
up with Violet van Patten, who’s established to be way too good for
him and gets pigeonholed into being his romantic interest and reciprocating
said interest as the story goes, even though she clearly hated his guts.
Josh Gad is a great guy, but his character here is a stain on his record. Ludlow Lamonsoff screams too much, is an annoying conspiracy theorist, and ends up basically boning Q*Bert. Most jokes seem to be about making him an even more awkward person to have around. He and Sam feel like huge stereotypes of gamers: smart but socially awkward, sometimes creepy, losers well into adulthood. Pleasant. Then there’s Q*Bert, best character in the film, and we all know what happens to him!
Josh Gad is a great guy, but his character here is a stain on his record. Ludlow Lamonsoff screams too much, is an annoying conspiracy theorist, and ends up basically boning Q*Bert. Most jokes seem to be about making him an even more awkward person to have around. He and Sam feel like huge stereotypes of gamers: smart but socially awkward, sometimes creepy, losers well into adulthood. Pleasant. Then there’s Q*Bert, best character in the film, and we all know what happens to him!
The enormous amount of errors and inconsistencies is
another major issue. The writers couldn’t be bothered to verify whether
anything the aliens used predated 1982. It’s like they went, “Eighties, they
got the core concept, let’s pick from that entire decade, even if it happened
past the year we’ve set”. Hell, if they were gonna struggle so badly with the
year, here is an idea: Set the intro in 1985! Oh, right. That would be the
arrival of home consoles, and it would defeat the point of the aliens using
only arcade monsters. Which is a rule they don’t even follow later on! Would it
have hurt to verify whether Max Headroom debuted in 1982 or later?
That’s not even getting into the gigantic plot holes,
especially those involving cheat codes. The more I look at the Pac-Man scene,
the more inconsistencies and plot holes I see. I have to stop at some point or
I’d spend a full part talking about the scene. And of course, the big twist is
that Eddie cheated both while playing Donkey Kong in 1982 and against Pac-Man…
which would be fine if these games had cheats. One could make the argument that
the writers invented cheats to make their story work, and I would agree if they
did so to make the story interesting. However, the film’s target audience –
retro gamers – knows these games inside and out and knows that the film made up
these plot elements, which is distracting and annoying.
The comedy isn’t even that great. I’m under the impression
that Sandler ad-libbed many of his lines, and in many cases it makes him sound
like an asshole, which gives us less reasons to root for Sam Brenner. Sure,
there are some funny moments in there – the Centipede following the training on
TV still gives me a giggle – but those moments are few and far between.
That’s not getting into the cringe-inducing sexism. In
this film, women are rewards. Sam earns Violet, Eddie earns his threesome,
Ludlow earns Lady Lisa – in a way that still sickens me. The only main male
character who doesn’t earn a woman is Will Cooper, and that’s because he
instead earned a great approval rating with how he dealt with the alien
situation. Look, I know that “winning the girl” was a popular trope of retro
games and that may be why they used it. It doesn’t make it right in a movie,
let alone a movie that was released in 2015. It’s wrong on so many levels. And
of course, it mostly happened at the end of the film, like the cherry on top of
this deplorable cake.
I'm really sorry for these child actors. |
Ah! Finally done with this one. Tune in next Friday
for something better. Yeah, I need something better too. Halloween’s coming,
maybe I should review something that relates to the topic of horror. I could
either go for something long or something short. Either way, see you then.
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