One thing you can say about Adam Sandler and his movie-making crew is that they’re dependable: No matter the premise, you can count on them taking the sloppiest, laziest approach imaginable. Director Chris Columbus and regular Sandler screenwriter Tim Herlihy expand Patrick Jean’s 2010 short film, as 1980s video-game prodigies (Sandler, Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage) are called on by the President of the United States (Kevin James—wait, what?) to save the world when an alien invasion takes the form of vintage video-game characters. The plot plays out like the mutant spawn of
GalaxyQuest and
Ghostbusters, with the supporting cast and some of the visual concepts—most borrowed directly from Jean’s short—providing the only spark of imagination. But mostly this is a messy attempt to make a movie for 10-year-olds built entirely on Gen X nostalgia, requiring expository descriptions of every video game premise between the tossed-off pop culture references. Anything that could have been fun about turning nerds who peaked in pre-pubescence into heroes is lost in a movie where the most creative idea anyone had was, “What would it look like if Q*bert pissed himself?”
By
Scott Renshaw