Sandy Kenyon reviews 'Pixels,' 'Paper Towns'

NEW YORK (WABC) -- If you remember the video games of the 80s, some of the scenes in the new movie "Pixels" are going to look very familiar.

The movie brings classic arcade games to life, but is the nostalgia enough to send you to the box office?

Retro 3-D special effects and Adam Sandler trying to be funny again are appreciated, but "Pixels" falls so far short of the mark. It's the result is another in a string of disappointments for the star.

The best movies for kids capture the imagination of everyone, but "Pixels" is not one of them.

While the concept of bringing 80s video game characters to live sounds lame, the end result is even worse.

More than 30 years ago, NASA sent a time capsule into space that included popular arcade games, but the aliens misinterpreted the gesture as an act of war. So now, they have sent the icons back in giant form to attack us.

Sandler, Josh Gadd and Peter Dinklage play former champs at these games, recruited by the president of the United States to save the world.

Kevin James plays the president, and Michelle Monahan has a thankless role as a military aide.

The icons from the 80s are colorful enough and certainly livelier than the actors going through the motions here. Parents who must sit through "Pixels" this weekend deserve sympathy.

Meanwhile, the coolest young woman around fascinates a cautious young man and prods him into action in "Paper Towns," based on the novel for young adults by John Green. It captures the magic of first love and how a special person can so completely captivate you during what another writer called his "younger and more vulnerable years."

Eighteen-year-old Jackie Xerri, who picked up her diploma a few weeks ago and goes off to college next month, says the characters in the movie could have been her best friends in real life. And after watching so many unrealistic movies about high school so chock full of cliches, it was refreshing to see her peers represented so accurately.