VGFlicks: Pixels (Part 5)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

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.

Total Dama Island did it first.

IS NOTHING SACRED TO YOU PEOPLE?
By the way, Q*Bert belongs to Columbia Pictures, who
are a part of Sony, who made this film. They agreed to
this scene where Q*Bert leaks on the floor.
Fuck you, movie.

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.

Thus, Sam gets a second wind, and the orchestral remix of We Will Rock You starts playing. You know, I raged about this movie a lot, but as I said before, THIS is a good song. Everything else may suck to various levels, but this track is a shining beam of light - although my enjoyment is dimmed, we just had Q*Bert pissing on the floor. You can't come back from this so easily.

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.

Sam gets better than before, and eventually he reaches the hostages along with Violet and Will. In the normal game, that should be all; but no, apparently DK has to be fought like a platforming boss now. Oh, and Q*Bert has to be rescued, so Violet pulls off some freaking impressive acrobatic moves to get to him and bring him to the top with the others. She always had those crazy moves? Then why was there a subplot about her husband not thinking of her as limber enough, thus running off with someone younger? Urgh, this movie has no logic, I should stop looking for logic.

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.

During that time, Ludlow and Eddie have been shooting at every enemy they were running into, but as a result the other video game characters all converge towards them. They’re being cornered by a literal army, with nothing but their light ray guns and Lady Lisa’s blades to fight back! (Once again: Lady Lisa is a video game character who took on a perfectly human form, then instantly fell for Ludlow after a weird declaration of love and she is now killing her own kind to help him. These facts still pain me deeply.)

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."

Violet is trapped as she tries to come back to the group, so Sam goes down with a hammer to rescue her, then faces Donkey Kong and both toss their weapon. The hammer goes through the barrel and crashes into DK, defeating him. Score 3-2 for mankind! This instantly stops the army on Earth, and they all self-destruct one by one, returning to the ship. The rescued African-American soldier thanks Will Cooper, but apparently the writers think thats ince the soldier isn't a white guy, then he has to say that Barack Obama is still his favorite. This victory isn’t without losses for the heroes, as Ludlow’s beloved Lady Lisa also self-destructs.

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*

The heroes are beamed back down on Earth, on the White House lawn, sometime after mankind’s victory. The following scene implies that Will signed a peace treaty with the aliens in their ship. Man! I wanted to see that! It would have been great to see the aliens behind the games! Sadly, again, this isn’t high-concept science-fiction, so screw any interesting part about the aliens. They just wanted to provide cool scenes of Sandler kicking the ass of various video game characters. Eddie admits that Sam is the better player at every game, including Donkey Kong. But hey, it’s all good for Eddie, for his help in saving the world he does get his threesome… with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart… who’s got a plate of Paninis… in the Lincoln bedroom.

No! Don't! You are kissing ADAM SANDLER!
Your career will be ruined!

Okay, I can cross “seeing Martha Stewart in a video game movie” off the list of thing that I thought would be impossible in the universe. It is utterly disgusting, though, how Eddie gets his reward, and it’s two women. Nearly just as disgusting is how Sam Brenner “wins the girl”, somewhat, as he finally gets into a relationship with Violet van Patten. Because that’s supposed to be a reward, right? Women are rewards in this movie. But you haven’t heard the worst. Well, okay, if you heard anything about this film, you have probably heard the worst, but here goes. After all that came before, the crowning achievement of awful.

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?

The blame lies on Adam Sandler, yes, but also on the screenwriters, Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling. The three of them allowed Sandler's brand of humor to taint this story and make it so asinine and tasteless. And while I have more class than to freely insult writers when they create such poor stories, I can at least tell them that they needed to rewrite this script a bunch of times before turning it into this 100-minute visual misery.

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.

I still personally love that shot, even if Pac-Man just looks nonplussed.

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!

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.

This movie is horrible. Now, if you watch it with someone who appreciates lowbrow humor and doesn’t have a lot of video game knowledge, they might enjoy it. You’re reading this blog, so you probably won’t. This is too bad, because I was hoping for this to be good back in 2015. I was sorely disappointed. I’d give it, at best, a 2.5 out of 10. It’s not the absolute worst piece of shit out there, but it’s still bound to be in quite a few Worst 10 lists when it comes to bad video game films. I still think it’s better than Gamer, but that’s faint praise as Gamer is still, in my opinion, the worst video game film that exists. Nonetheless, I will be selling back on eBay my copy of Pixels, because I see no point in keeping it.

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.