Pixels (2015) Adam Sandler, Kevin James – Movie Review

In 1982, Sam Brenner was one of the best video gamers around his local arcade. But not THE best, as he would eventually lose in a Worldwide Video Arcade Championship competition to the cocky, pimp-voiced, and mulleted Eddie “The Fireblaster” Plant, who bests him at the wildly popular “Donkey Kong” to steal the victory. NASA had sponsored the event, and used the footage from the competition to send up to space, where it would eventually be found by aliens who take what they find as a declaration of war, and who come to Earth, ‘Space Invaders’-style, to take over things using representations found from the video games they viewed from the original video.

Flash forward to today, and Will is now the President of the United States. Along with conspiracy theorist whack-job Ludlow Lamonsoff and fresh-from-prison former-nemesis Eddie Plant, Brenner, who now works as a low-level home electronics install guy, has to go to wherever the action is in order to apply his video game skills to thwart the advancing aliens in their various glowing cube forms, and in the process, save the Earth from destruction. He also finds that one of his customers, the hot single mom Violet Van Patten, is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that is heading the front against the invasion, though they have to rely in the gamers because the military lacks the kind of hand-eye coordination necessary to best these games. What a chance for a geek to impress the hot babes by saving the world!