Pixels

Directed by Chris Columbus, Pixels follows several protagonists, including Adam Sandler’s Sam Brenner, Kevin James’ Will Cooper, and Peter Dinklage’s Eddie Plant, as they’re forced to battle alien invaders that have disguised themselves as popular 1980s video-game characters. It’s a fun, innovative premise that is, for the most part, employed to underwhelming and frequently tedious effect by Columbus, as the filmmaker, working from Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling’s screenplay, delivers an erratically-paced endeavor that’s been riddled with ill-advised attempts at humor and eye-rollingly ineffective tangents and digressions – with the latter especially true of an entirely unconvincing (and rather tedious) romantic subplot between Sandler and Michelle Monaghan’s respective figures. And although the picture admittedly does boast a small handful of fun sequences, including (and especially) a climactic battle against no less than Donkey Kong, Pixels‘ relentlessly frenetic execution ultimately renders the movie’s positive attributes moot and, in the end, cements its place as an almost prototypically ineffective Sandler blockbuster.

** out of ****