moviereview - Meet The Spartans

MEET THE SPARTANS

	A parody of 300 and current popular culture from the makers of Scary Movie.	score 0	moviereview rates films from 1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Sean Maguire, Carmen Electra, Kevin Sorbo, Kevin Davitian

Director
Jason Friedberg
Aaron Seltzer

Screenwriter
Jason Friedberg
Aaron Seltzer

Country
USA

Rating / Running Time
M / 83 minutes

Australian Release
March 2008

Official Site

If you were one who thought Epic Movie was the worst film ever made, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The meaningless title alone indicates just how lame Meet The Spartans, a witless parody of the witless 300, will be. For all its failings, Epic Movie had David Carradine, Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge. This has that guy from Hercules.

It opens on a mountaintop where young Spartans are being sorted for warrior potential. A baby Shrek vomits and is discarded. Things retreat rapidly from this high point of comic cinema as 300’s broad plotline - Sparta’s King Leonidas leads an army of beefcake warriors with spray-on abs to fight Persians in the desert – is peppered with pop-culture references by way of parodying the world around us. Allegedly.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been peddling puerile comedies since Scary Movie jumped the fence in 2000. Now creatively bankrupt, the pair has turned in the singularly most infantile comedy in cinema history. Apart from a mercifully short running time, there’s not a single redeeming feature about Meet The Spartans: a film whose juvenile, self-indulgent, boorish attempts at humour will send its target audience, whoever they might be and frankly we’ve got no idea, to sleep.

From the woeful array of tit, gay, fart and puke jokes to a bewildering dance-off and some nasty back-handers (Spears and Lohan may be celebrity misfits but they don’t deserve this), it is impossible to understand why anyone thought the script, presumably scrawled on the back of a shopping docket, would work. Friedberg and Seltzer could learn a thing or two from Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story that, while no Oscar contender, shows how parody can make a point. For if there’s one thing this steaming pile of putrescence is, it’s pointless.

// COLIN FRASER