ironhorse_iv Review of The Wizard

The Wizard (1989)

The Wizard took a wicked wiz. Its smells, but it's nostalgic as hell. Now you're playing with power

[6/10 · 25 November 2014]

Welcome to a bad example of Nintendo Propaganda! 8-Bit Nintendo. 2 Bit Script. The Wizard is a lousy movie, but it's a guilty pleasure of mine. Directed by Todd Holland, the movie reminds me of Wonder Years meets 'Rain Man' with Nintendo. The Wizard also known as Joy Stick Heroes, Sweet Road, The Video Game Genius, Game Over and Gameboy in other countries is an adventure comedy-drama film about three children who decide to runaway to California after the death of a family member. The weak main plot is undermined, by the superior sub-plot of one of the children, Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards), while being emotionally withdrawn, has a useful skill in video games. He's so good, that he's allow to take part of a video game tournament. This 20% part of the film, brings most of the entertaining value; while the other 80% is under par. The whole emotional depth of Jimmy trying to overcome his grief for his sister, is truly not develop, right. That plot is not emotion enough, to care about, and nearly forgotten over the superior entertaining video game sub-plot. The jokes with Jimmy's father, Sam (Beau Bridges) & older brother, Nick (Christian Slater) trying to reach the children, first, between Putnam (Will Seltzer), a greedy and sleazy runaway-child bounty hunter does, is pretty awful and unfunny. Why are both groups sabotaging each other's efforts? Isn't the child well-being more important than this childish badgering? Why is the adults in this film, acting like children, while the children is acting more like adults? Most of the humor are really bad in this film. A young girl loudly accusing the man of molesting her is supposed to be funny? Not funny. Not funny at all. Lots of unrealistic kid movie moments that kinda hurt the film, a bit. How could a 9-year-old boy walk miles along a desert highway without being noticed? I doubt the kids would find enough old rich people playing video games to gambling against. It's not like today, where video games have more appeal to an older generation that lived through video games eras like Atari. Games were pretty mediocre, in graphics and story back then. I doubt many adults played video games at the time. The Wizard is famous for its numerous references to video games and accessories for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Power Glove is one of those scenes that make the product look amazing; while in truth, the power glove is indeed truly bad. It doesn't even work, most of the time with it hard to control difficulty. Playing the game, Rad Racer on it, isn't easy at all! The film was also well known for the debut of Super Mario Bros. 3. The whole game tournament was indeed tense. Still, it was a bit odd for Jimmy to find a cheap code on a yet to debut game. Honestly, how did he know where to find the warp levels? There were a lot of Inaccuracies BS moments throughout this film. A good example is when Jimmy plays Double Dragon at the bus stop, Corey remarks that Jimmy scored 50,000 points. Jimmy achieved this in less than two minutes of play when in reality it would take playing through nearly the entire game to do so, which would take much more time. Nearly every video game that's played for any length of time in this movie is depicted incorrectly. And this as Product Placement paid for by Nintendo. It is things like this; that would turn off viewers. Still, a lot of old school gamers, would love to revisit this film as it show cast gameplay from Nintendo hits like Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Contra, Double Dragon, Mega Man 2, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden. It was a bit odd for Nintendo to showcase, some of their really crappy games as well like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Zelda II: the Adventure of Link. As much, as it's nice to see somebody else, play the games well. It's well better to play it yourself. The movie is full of product placement, examples ranges from the family passes by the Cabazon Dinosaurs, a highway tourist attractions to the last part of the film taking place at Universal Studios in California. Large amounts of the time toward the end is use just to showcase extended advertisement for the studio tour. I think that one of the reasons, this movie fails. It felt like a feature length commercial than a movie. The supporting acting in the film was pretty alright at the time. Fred Savage as Jimmy's brother, Corey and Jenny Lewis as Haley were pretty good in their roles. The music by J. Peter Robinson is alright. Overall: This PG-rated 97 minutes, commercial movie has maintains a cult following within the video game culture for good reasons. It's clearly not for the story, but the nostalgia factor of the games that were represented here. So check it out if you want to. Other than that. This movie is game over.