MEET THE SPARTANS [PG-13]
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the crayon-wielding Fakespeares who doody-bombed movie theaters with flat and failingly funny fart-fests like Date Movie and Epic Movie are at it again with their latest spoof. Like a rash with a funny name that just won’t go away, the duo sends up Zack Snyder’s stylish bloodbath 300, among other movies, and the result is the kind of flat-line you get when you hook an EKG up to a potato, a bowl of petunias or Dick Cheney. They can’t even be bothered to come up with funny names for their characters, like in even the most pedestrian of MAD Magazine parodies. And gods forbid should they come up with a damn gag that’s not blue or making reference to the homoerotic nature of a cast of buff, oiled warriors. It’s an approach to the material about as novel as the ass who tries to get laid at a party by doing third-rate Borat impressions, or worse yet, Austin Powers. Someone needs to whisk these guys to an undisclosed location until they can recite every line of Blazing Saddles and Airplane! verbatim, because the only mastery they show here is of the mechanics of the “pull my finger” routine. A clever parody is more than just dressing your sets and your actors to look like Spartans or Hobbits or pirates named Jack. You have to give them something to more to say than what every hack water cooler stand-up mangling a Leno or Conan monologue has already. It’s not too much to ask, considering that movie tickets have already crept past $10.00 in some cities. With this kind of twaddle clogging the megaplexes, it is as if the writer’s strike has already taken its toll, with the studios filming the movies with only a poster as a script. –Robert Newton