Calling The Wizard nothing more than a 100-minute commercial for Nintendo would only be partially accurate. It's a 100-minute commercial for lots of other things, too. The way in which it goes about being this craven, strictly pecuniary beast is truly something to behold. The Wizard is a very bad movie in ways few bad movies dare to even attempt. One is in over-estimating the appeal of its lead. I'm pretty sure there was, because I was there, but I still need to ask: was there ever a time when people legitimately thought Fred Savage was cool? He always had passable comic timing and was more fluent with text than most kid actors, but whenever he'd have those "I'm so cool" moments it came off even funnier than when he tried to be funny. The reason The Wonder Years worked (well, one of them) was because he wasn't trying to be cool, ditto The Princess Bride (which he also, mercifully, was barely in). And while Savage's "I'm so cool" moment in The Wizard -- a quasi-self-parodying moment in which a be-sunglassed Savage pulls a miniature Sinatra routine asking a casino cocktail waitress for licorice that was a little too quasi- and not enough self-parodying -- is pretty bad, it's brief and by no means the biggest problem in the movie. Nor, surprisingly, is the relentless Nintendo hard-sell. The story exists as an engine to get Fred Savage's withdrawn, gamer-savant manqu half-brother to the big video game competition in California, via