Columbia PicturesCan someone put in an order for burn ointment and deliver it to Adam Sandler? Size? Bulk. Quantity? Lifetime supply. He got roasted.
Sandler's latest film, Pixels, only brought in $24 million over the weekend, but on the bright(?) side, it is bringing in loads of harsh reviews that will entertain you more than this movie probably ever will.
We're not sure what happened with this movie. It had an original premise and the short it is based on is wonderfully clever. So between getting the green light and debuting in theaters, something horrible happened because critics and fans hated this movie with the passion of a billion nerds. And if you ask anyone what went wrong with Pixels, 99% of the time you'll get one answer: "Adam Sandler." Basically, io9's review title said it all: "Adam Sandler Has Never Ruined a Movie as Much as He Ruins Pixels."
Pixels, which also stars Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage (what's he doing in this movie?) and Michelle Monaghan, is currently sitting not-so-pretty with an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is ranking higher than some of Sandler's other offerings, like Grown Ups 2 (7%) and Jack and Jill (3%), but it's rated lower than You Don't Mess With the Zohan (38%). Yikes.
The reviews from critics are hilariously brutal, and it seems everyone has had enough of Sandler's lazy movie-making crap because no one held anything back:
"Take the basic premise from Galaxy Quest but swap out Star Trek with retro video games, throw in some nifty special effects and what could possibly go wrong? Three words: Adam F#%&ing Sandler….In scene after scene, Sandler's bozo loser schtick brings Pixels to a screeching halt…Sandler is hogging the screen with his humiliatingly unfunny self-confidence conflict and love interest arc. The silence, where there was supposed to be laughter, made the screening I attended uncomfortable."—Mashable
"Pixels in an unmitigated piece of godawful dog s--t. It's existence feels ultimately like poison or a general infection. It is cinematic strychnine, celluloid chlamydia. Pixels isn't a movie, it's a mother--king active crime scene, and the crime is cultural vandalism…Pixels is bad enough to make you hate the things you love, and watching it made me want to take a blowtorch to every scrap of video game memorabilia in my home."—MovieBob
"Nobody expects much from Sandler's films, but Pixels is a grim reminder that they could always be even worse…Even Q*bert seems embarrassed having to act alongside him."—Popular Mechanics
"Of course, calling Pixels one of Sandler's better movies is like calling a particular strain of Ebola somewhat less horrifically painful; either way, it's not pleasant."—Las Vegas Weekly
"Hell, I'd even have been happy if Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore or The Waterboy was the star of this movie. Instead it's plain old Adam Sandler, slogging through long dialogue sequences, negating any of the brief goodwill the film could have just stumbled into. This movie feels as though Sandler walked on set straight from his trailer, read his lines off a cue-card, then went back to sleep. At every turn, his indifference to the material is palpable."—io9
"As executed, it's like Contact meets Armageddon meets sticking knives into my eyes."—The Verge, who aptly titled their piece "Adam Sandler Must Be Stopped."
But if you want a gift that doesn't stop giving, just scroll through the audience reviews, because those are chock full of gems that really shine:
"If I could give negative stars to this 106-minute insult to gaming, I would. It's sexist, boring, lazy, bafflingly inconsistent, and just plain badly written. Spend the time you would have been watching this movie instead walking barefoot over LEGOs, and you will have fewer regrets."—Rebecca S.
"Adam Sandler is a money hog and his movies are as funny as the holocaust. If I had to choose between getting waterboarded and watching an Adam Sandler movie, I would be waterboarded while bamboo sticks inside my fingernails."—Marco C.
"I would compare what [Sandler] has done with this movie to the same feeling I have about George Lucas going back and editing Star Wars Episode 6."—Megumi S
"This film took a s--t on my brain and left it to rot."—Daniel P.
"A cultural crime scene."—Luke M
"This crap couldn't possibly be considered a movie. It's more like a torture device for your vision, an insult to even the lowest IQ. I hated this movie. I don't have many regrets in life, but taking my daughter to see this rates pretty high…This movie is a travesty, an utter misery to behold. I really wanted to claw my eyeballs out, but, again, had it not been for my daughter being there with me, I'd be f--king blind right now."—Jason F.
"The very existence of this movie is a net subtraction on the sum total of human knowledge. It should be erased from the cultural record."—Stuart D.
"This movie is the death of nostalgia. I should have known that as soon as I seen Adam Sandler's scrubby 'I'm the man' smirky face. This movie is literally a bunch of jokes and sexism."—Courtney A.
"Actually disgusting. Such a bad movie with incredibly poor everything and a s--t ton of sexism."—Gaia G.
"No, just no. This movie has nothing funny or interesting to say. It spews out so much garbage that it's almost painful to watch."—Sidd M.
"As usual, Sandler takes the low road and heaves a steaming pile of dung onto the screen and gleefully heads off laughing all the way to the bank...the best day in the history of movie industry will be the day he leaves it."—Bobh2000
"The entire time I watched this, I could only think 'this is a plot to a Futurama episode, except with Adam Sandler's friends' In the words of an actual somewhat decent Happy Madison production: 'I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.'"—Stone E.
"The short film did it better. And it doesn't even have a f--king plot."—Rafael L
"'We should totally do that!' Adam Sandler reportedly said after viewing the 2-minute short film that inspired his new movie Pixels. It was a looped video of a schnauzer shitting on its own face…Had Sandler hired a VFX team that matched his own level of (in)competence, the audience would have been treated to a production with crudely-drawn stick figures on notebook paper suspended in front of a shaky camera with fishing line."—gatorpower
"There are no words to how bad this movie is."—Cullen P.
"Lazy and uninspired, it seems as though Sandler and his team of 12 year olds wrote the film over the weekend and forgot to proof read…Pixels wouldn't be worth the one-dollar you pay for an arcade game. So, if you enjoy continuous fart jokes and shitty pop culture references, then this may be the perfect movie for you. Others needn't apply."—Sam M
"Garbage. I need to wash in pure bleach to remove such a foul stench."—Tucker
In short: if we may borrow a moment from Pixels, if critics and movie goers are Pac-Man and Adam Sandler is the fire truck, this is basically what happened:
Did any of you guys see Pixels yet? If so, do you agree with these reviews or would you say they were too hard on Sandler and Co.?