Joyless shtick: Adam Sandler’s ‘Pixels’ gets poor reviews

As moviegoers decide whether or not to insert coin for Adam Sandler’s arcade-game-themed comedy “Pixels” this weekend, critics are giving it anything but high scores.

The majority of reviews say the movie — which stars Sandler as a middle-aged joystick jockey enlisted to fight off an 8-bit alien invasion — wastes a clever idea (borrowed from a 2010 short film) with shoddy execution.

The Times’ Mark Olsen writes, “Some movies are so interminable that it seems they might never end, while others are assembled with such indifference that you are essentially left waiting for them to start. ‘Pixels’ somehow manages both.”

Playing “like a knock-off ‘The Goonies’ for the arrested-development set,” the film takes a “spectacular premise and then treats it flatly, with no sense of wonder,” Olsen adds. And it’s “all the more frustrating for the few stray interesting ideas that are left hanging because they would require thinking and work to draw them out.”

The Associated Press’ Sandy Cohen agrees that “the core concept is clever” but the execution “is a mess. This disappointing comedy falls apart before it begins because no one would behave the way its characters do, and their ridiculous choices drive the action.”

Part of the problem, Cohen continues, is that “it’s unclear who the filmmakers think their audience is. This is a big-budget spectacle about 1980s nostalgia aimed at kids who have no emotional connection to the decade. ‘Pixels’ is also insanely sexist, culminating with the winning male characters each rewarded with a woman. Seriously, they get human women as prizes. They literally call one a trophy.”

New York magazine’s Bilge Ebiri writes, “It’s hard not to look at ‘Pixels’ and feel like Sandler & Co. missed a huge opportunity here.” As leading man, “Sandler plays it all so awkwardly that any meaning is lost amid a queasy sea of awkward pauses and halfhearted line-delivery. I say this as a fan: He seems tired. Not merely lazy, let’s-just-cash-the-check tired. It’s a drained, get-me-out-of-here tired. This could have been the ultimate Sandler movie — it’s all ‘80s in-jokes — but he’s barely there for it.”

Eventually, Ebiri says, the movie “starts to approach cult-film levels of weirdness. … But most of it comes from the sheer rudderlessness of the movie: an actor who doesn’t want to be there, a director who doesn’t know what to do, a conceit that runs on autopilot, and a muddle of tones that feels like the screenwriting software is crashing around us as we watch.”

Other shrugs come via the Hollywood Reporter (“this one-note comedy runs out of gas within an hour”), Salon (“an overwhelmingly sad experience”) and Variety (“a dimwitted ‘80s nostalgia trip”).

Game over? Not quite, as a few critics have been favorable, if not effusive. Among them is Katie Walsh, writing for the Chicago Tribune. She says, “‘Pixels’ is a blast of energetic fun, though it doesn’t attempt to stray outside the lines or reflect on its ‘Godzilla’-style formula; the novelty of nostalgic video game characters as space invaders sustains the film, thanks to the spectacularly executed and original effects.”

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