Jason Friedberg and Aaron
Seltzer, the writer-director-producer team behind Date Movie, Epic Movie, and now Meet The
Spartans,
have a nice racket going. At the beginning of the year, during the pre-Oscar
doldrums when studios quickly and quietly dump failed projects into theaters to
die ignoble deaths, Friedberg and Seltzer release another half-assed, quickie
spoof flick. They've done it for three years in a row, and the strategy so far
has led to big opening weekends followed by precipitous drop-offs once word
gets around that, shockingly, their movies are fucking terrible. Meet The
Spartans is
willfully disposable, leaning heavily on references to timeless cultural
touchstones like Stomp The Yard and the "Leave Britney Alone!" guy. But it's
undeniably canny hucksterism. In another life, Friedberg and Seltzer might have
been successful bumper-sticker salesmen, always in search of new objects of
scorn for Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes to piss on. Instead, they get by with bad
movies that are more marketable than the bad movies they're competing against.
While previous entries in
the Friedberg/Seltzer canon poked fun—using the word "fun" very
loosely—at whole genres of movies, like romantic comedies and summer
blockbusters, Meet The Spartans focuses mainly on one film, 300. While there's enough
comedic material there for as many as three somewhat tolerable minutes of MADtv, Meet The Spartans gamely alternates between
unfunny gay jokes and violent pratfalls for a good 80 minutes, finding time for
not one, but two musical dance numbers set to "I Will Survive."
Meet The Spartans feels thin even given its mercifully
brief running time, but that isn't for lack of pop-culture references.
Everything from American Idol to Shrek to Ugly Betty—yep, that
overexposed America Ferrera finally gets brought down a peg—is skewered.
And by skewered, Friedberg and Seltzer mean "introduced in the most obvious
fashion possible, then kicked and/or puked on." The only laughs in Meet The
Spartans come,
unintentionally, from the most ridiculously on-the-nose references. (Borat star Ken Davitian is
introduced as "the fat guy from Borat.") Do Friedberg and Seltzer not trust the
audience to get a simple Borat reference without blatant explanations? Do they
worry that stupidity is contagious? If it is, they have millions of dead brain
cells on their hands.