There are funny movies and then there are Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer movies. Generally I’m lucky if their films give me the slightest urge to laugh, but as I sat watching their latest attempt at a spoof I came to realize that the two are actually providing movie-goers an incredibly important service.
By showing audiences how excruciating, asinine, nauseating, hateful, unbearable, predictable and downright crappy a comedy can be, it makes us appreciate the good comedies that much more.
Obviously someone out there loves their spoof projects (of which there are four: Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie and now Meet The Spartans) because they make good money at the box office.
Or, maybe it’s just the result of brilliant marketing. By seeing all forty-five seconds of slightly amusing material in the trailer, audiences assume the rest of the movie must be pretty funny too, thereby being lured into spending ten dollars on the cinematic equivalent of an enema.
How bad is it? At the theater I had the honor of sitting behind two young teenage guys. I can only assume they are the target audience for the movie since it pushes as far as it can without crossing out of PG-13 territory and banks itself on jokes involving childish homo-eroticism and the word “boobies”. These two teenagers, like myself, spent most of movie yawning or occasionally snickering when the actors managed to do something almost funny.
There wasn’t a hearty laugh to be heard through the entire show and, at one point, one of them actually proclaimed in a loud voice “this is stupid”. Normally I abhor people talking out loud during a show, but in this case I was grateful. It needed to be said. – Cinema Hobbit , Meet The Spartans – Review
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