Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Meet The Spartans


If you go into a spoof movie with high expectations. Shame on you. You are bound to be disappointed. My son wanted to see this movie, so I agreed, going in with low expectations. I was still disappointed. There were very few redeeming moments in this film that relied heavily on fart, poop and vomit jokes and sheer vulgarity.

I am going to start with the writing because the writing alone destroyed any hope that this movie had of succeeding. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it was written by a couple of eighth graders. The movie basically follows the plot of 300, but incorporates spoofs from several other recent movies, as well as borrowing heavily from pop culture in general. The writing was very tedious and tried too hard to incorporate too much stuff that just didn't fit. Additionally, there is only so much a person can take of fart and poop gags. There were three scenes of scrambled up-skirt shots, which were somewhat gratuitous. I take that back, they were completely gratuitous.

When you have an actor cast to play a real person that they don't look anything like, it can be a problem. There are those rare people (Rich Little comes to mind) that are so exceptional at their impersonations, that any physical dissimilarity becomes secondary. The actor cast in the lead role, Sean McGuire, actually looked a lot like the main character Leonidis from 300. The character similarities pretty much stopped there. Carmen Electra is Carmen Electra...she's hot, which is about all her role was cast to be. Ken Davitian was intolerable as Xerxes, probably more because of the writing than his acting. Jim Piddock was cast as Simon Cowell and did a hideous job of that role. Crista Flanagan did okay as an Ugly Betty look-alike. The only redeeming performance was from Nicole Parker who played multiple roles. Her Paula Abdul didn't look very good, but the mannerism were (as Simon might say) Spot On. She also played Britney, Paris Hilton and Ellen DeGeneres. Her Ellen was actually pretty decent. Overall, the acting was almost as depressing as the writing.

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