MEET THE SPARTANS
Starring Sean Maguire, Carmen Electra. Written and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. (PG) 70 min. Opens Jan 25
When the fat guy from Borat (Ken Davitian) shows up in the Meet the Spartans, the narrator describes him as “looking like the fat guy from Borat” — you know, in case the audience didn’t get the joke. And given the gnat-scaled attention span of their intended audience — i.e. the school-skipping, cell-phone answering 12-year olds at my opening-afternoon screening — maybe you can’t blame Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer for such blatant annotation.
The fact is that they simply don’t know any better. These guys, who previously authored Date Movie and Epic Movie, are not really filmmakers. They’re parasites working in the regurgitation business. Even then it’s hard to get too angry about what they’re spewing, because it wasn’t palatable on its way down the collective maw. You can’t debase a piece of crap like 300. Meet the Spartans undoubtedly tests patience even though it barely runs an hour before the end credits, and it’s relentlessly mean-spirited, and it’s completely and totally unfunny — it exists in a vacuum of talent or craft where Kevin Sorbo is the most talented comic in sight. But it’s hardly unprecedented.
At its core, it’s just a less sophisticated (OK, considerably less sophisticated) live-action version of Family Guy — an exercise in pop culture citation masquerading as satire. True satire requires engagement, but since none of its barn-side-broad targets (OMG! Britney Spears) are worth caring about, Meet the Spartans isn’t really a failure (at least not on those terms). Friedberg and Seltzer are parasitical hacks, but they’re merely symptoms of an enfeebled movie culture. Until the mainstream produces some films undeserving of idiot violation, the idiot violation represented by Meet the Spartans — a Xerox of absolute zero — will be par for the course.