Since precisely no one on the staff wanted to review this film, we’ll let MovieBob take the hit and tell you what he thinks about Adam Sandler’s latest work.
Warning: The video contains a lot of foul language, so headphones would be a good idea if you’re at work, at home with young ears, or in the cafe.
For reference, here’s the original short that was optioned as the basis for the feature-length film. (Totally safe for work and actually pretty fun). Rumor has it, the creators of the original are less-than-pleased with new film, but still got a cool $1,000,000 for the rights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou8vRWTSsJo
I must say that I was really disappointed that they pushed to a PG-13 movie – the language & content changes to go from PG to PG-13 have turned a family movie into something I won’t be taking my (young) family to, and we had been really looking forward to seeing it.
I like the short film, and was baffled anyone thought it would make a full-length comedy.
However, if anyone ever wanted to pay that much money for the rights to something I did, I’m pretty sure I could live with it.
My 10 year old son was insistent on seeing this despite the reviews, so I took one for the team.
Its biggest problem is that it’s just not good. It was a great premise that was wasted on Adam Sandler and his cohorts. Lots of things made zero sense whatsoever. It looked gorgeous but even trying to shut off my brain didn’t work for many of the things that happened (Cheat codes? Q*Bert speaking English? Q*Bert randomly turning into Lady Lisa at the end? And what happened to the duck hunt dog? It just disappeared.). My son claims to have really liked it, though he also had issues with a couple parts mentioned in the spoiler text above.
I counted only a half a dozen or so times throughout the film that anyone (including me) in the audience laughed audibly.
In summary: While I would by no means recommend seeing it in the theater (unless you want to drop coin to see the SFX), I don’t think it’s quite the radioactive cinematic waste some seem to believe it to be. If you’re morbidly curious, wait for it to rent/stream/etc. It’s not Adam Sandler’s worst movie, but it’s far from his best work.
My biggest fear is that if this tanks at the box office it might have other repercussions against future works with even vaguely similar overlaps in subject matter.
Overall, it was pretty good. Most of the bad comments about the movie are from people who never watched it. We saw an early Thursday night screening, it was about 3/4 full and showing on 2 screens, so turn out was pretty good. Most of the people laughed quite a bit, even kids like 8-10 sitting near us who likely had never played any of these games.
Don’t be whiny on it being a pg13 movie, kids surly see worse things on youtube and vine videos, if not with you, when they are with the cool older kid. It was the same theme as a futurama episode from about 10 years ago, but almost nothing in tv or movies is an original idea anymore.