Meet the Spartans
Review
by Clint Morris
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If Date
Movie was being reluctantly strapped down to an
iron mattress, and Epic Movie
was feeling a sharpened knife cut through that first layer of skin,
then Meet the
Spartans is the equivalent of having your intestines
removed with the blade and hearing them smash against a brick wall…
Yes, it’s that painful.
The
not-so-talented but oh-so-rich writing team (Jason Friedberg and Aaron
Seltzer) that have tricked audiences into seeing their shitty spoof
movies twice now (first with the rom-com spoof Date Movie then
with the All-blockbusters-get-it outing Epic Movie) return
with their third – and far from final – outing. And yes, we will come….
We don’t seem to know any bloody better.
Like the shitty Saw
sequels that have become an annual cinematic event for the dimish, the
yearly piss-take-of-everything-that-came-out-the-year-before draws the
common man in like Lindsay to a rehab centre – and nobody can really
tell you why!
And unlike rehab, you definitely don’t walk away feeling cleansed
It’s
definitely not the humour (there are next to no laughs in any of these
movies); it’s definitely not the performances (there’s a reason Carmen
Electra has never stood on a podium) and well, it’s definitely not the
spot-on lampooning of films and TV (Sure, there’s one or two scenes
that work – for instance, in Meet the Spartans
the piss-take on loopy Britney Spears and her frightening style of
child rearing) so what drug are theatre owners offering with every
ticket purchased to these pieces of shit?!
Meet
the Spartans,
for all of it’s 65 minutes (I shit you not, take out the credits and it
goes for just over an hour! There should be a god damn rule against
making movies so short!), attempts to extract the comedy out of last
year’s epic CGI hit 300.
All
the obvious gags are here – the latent homosexuality, the twists on the
rousing speeches, the sexy wife, the all-too-obvious traitor and of
course the freakish-looking enemy (in this case, “The fat guy from Borat”,
as one character announces). And then there’s the stuff that
doesn’t-fit-but-we’ll-just-throw-it-in-anyway like the Paris Hilton
gag, the Grand
Theft Auto sequence, the-wife-turns-into-Venom scene, the
nod to reality TV shows like America’s Next Top Model
and American
Idol and the intolerable and never-ending dance-off
between the two fighting armies - You Got Served
style.
Remember when spoof movies use to actually be good? Inspired? Funny? It
wasn’t that long ago. Yes, Flying
High remains the ultimate in big-screen lampoons – we
still quote lines from it! Can you even remember a line from Date Movie?
The Wayans’ brothers had us busting a gut with their original (I stress
‘the original’ because the sequels were about as funny as Meet the Spartans;
ironically, Flying
High director David Zucker directed the last couple of
sequels) Scary
Movie. It was a corker. When did the genre go from
undeniably fun to intolerably painful?
There’s better way to spend 65 minutes than with the Spartans – like,
for instance, ironing that big pile of clothes that’s been sitting on
your sofa for the week.
See ya next year, y’all!
0.5 out
of 5
Meet the
Spartans
Australian release: 28th
February, 2008
Cast: Sean Maguire, Carmen Electra, Kevin
Sorbo, Diedrich Bader, Method Man, Jim Piddock
Director: Jason Friedberg
& Aaron Seltzer
Website: Official Website.
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