Michelle Monaghan, Adam Sandler, Josh Gad and Q*bert (Columbia Pictures)

What if the mad video game skills you had as a teenager weren’t worthless, but in fact made you peculiarly qualified as an adult to save the world? That is the fantasy behind Adam Sandler’s latest terribly-reviewed product, Pixels. I have a tolerance for Sandler higher than the average movie critic, forgiving him any number of transgressions merely for agreeing to make Punch-Drunk Love, one of my favorite movies. I often find myself genuinely moved by Sandler’s silly multi-million dollar atrocities. But even I had to draw the line at Jack and Jill and That’s My Boy, both of which featured a mean-spirited star that was a far cry from the likable underdog persona Sandler had long cultivated. I’ve skipped his most recent appearances, anchored by The Cobbler, which received such bad buzz that it didn’t even open here (it’s currently on Netflix Instant, if, for whatever reason, you feel like watching it).

The word on Pixels has been terrible, and I’m not going to tell you it’s a good movie. Many critics have correctly pointed out that the concept is far from original, even if it weren’t based on a short film about the earth becoming pixelated.

But it’s not a terrible movie. And I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. If The Last Starfighter and an episode of Futurama both featured plot points about young gamers who use their skills to save the world, Pixels fits this into Sandler’s recurring motif of arrested development, trying to wring some kind of silk purse out of the sow’s ear of modern American adolescence.

If anything, it’s more pathetic than its ancestors. We meet Brenner, Cooper, and Ludlow in 1982, when they were boys competing in the world video game championship. Brenner loses the final round of Donkey Kong to Eddie, aka The Fire Blaster. More than 30 years later, Brenner (Sandler) and Cooper (Kevin James), who still keep in touch, are sitting in a bar talking about their troubled and dissolved marriages. Cooper has somehow grown up to be President of the United States, albeit a President regularly mocked in the media for appearing to be a buffoon. But Brenner’s early gift for electronics got him no further in life than the lowly station of an electronics installation guy.

On a fateful home installation call, Brenner meets Violet (Michelle Monaghan), a now-single mother whose husband has just left her for a 19-year-old. Pixels may be full of plot holes and general ridiculousness, and if it’s not very funny, at this point it isn’t even trying to be. Longtime Sandler screenwriter Tim Herlihy may be setting up a mindless adventure comedy geared toward adolescents, but he paints a picture of adulthood filled with thwarted potential and profound pain.

Peter Dinklage (Columbia Pictures)

Their recourse for the pain: joystick heroism, sort of. It turns out Violet works for the President, and she and Brenner are both called to the White House in crisis mode when alien invaders (specifically, Galaga) descend upon earth to turn into pixels. Galaga and other classic arcade video games have come to attack the planet because a VHS tape of the 1982 Video Game Championships was launched into space. Aliens interpreted this as an earthly act of aggression and have replicated the games to launch their own attack. This extraterrestrial power broadcasts its declarations of war via faces of the ‘80s: Reagan and Madonna.

There’s something subversive about the concept: our disposable pop culture has come back to destroy us. The choices of pop icons are telling: O’ Rourke and Tattoo from Fantasy Island appear to alert earthlings of their next attack, and they are in fact coming from a television show that was a cautionary tale, regularly showing its all-star guests that if their deepest fantasies came true, they’d learn that what it wouldn’t turn out the way they imagined it at all.

There is no such lesson in Pixels. its heroes’s skills rewarded not with wisdom and real lives, but pixelated trophies. Any cultural commentary may well be coincidental. I’m sure I’m projecting when I imagine that the disintegration of human landmarks into pixels is a sharp commentary on the impermanence of digital film delivery versus celluloid.

But director Chris Columbus (Home Alone and a couple of Harry Potter movies) keeps things relatively watchable, if not revelatory. While Peter Dinklage and Josh Gad inject some life, if not likability, into the movie, Monaghan, who was so good in indie movies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Trucker, has the hardened look of a once-aspiring actor who’s now resorted to Adam Sandler movies.

Sandler himself seems to walk through it in a haze, not a return to his puppy-dog persona so much as the death march of defeated artist. Sure, there are plot holes, but it’s an Adam Sandler movie, and as far as those things go, I can give it the qualified, backhanded praise that it’s the best I’ve seen from him since You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

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Pixels
Directed by Chris Columbus
Written by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling
With Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan
Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive comments
105 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you