By Justin Moore
Some movies sore out abs with their hilarious gags, jokes and one-liners. Some movies are so powerfully funny that the lines in those movies echo through the halls of buildings (schools, offices, apartments, etc) all across America. Some movies, do all of those. “Meet the Spartans” is not one of those movies.
A spoof of “300”, “Meet the Spartans” follows almost the exact same plot line. “But it’s a parody,” I hear. No, “Spartans” copies almost scene for scene from “300” making the line between parody and plagiarism blur into a thick grey mass of wasted movie ticket money.
It follows the story of King Leonidas (Sean Maguire), starting from a boy and then growing into a man who fights against the Persian empire. Oh, but in “Spartans” Leonidas only has 13 men, not 300. That’s… that’s suppose to be one of the jokes, I think.
The Good:
It’s hard to sift through all of the… umm… stuff to find something good about “Spartans.” Well, it is, in all definitions of the word, a movie. There are some moving pictures, and some dialogue. There is maybe one funny part in the movie, but they showed that part in the commercials so it was an old joke before the movie even premiered.
The Bad:
The movie market has been flooded with parodies lately. There’s “Walk Hard,” “Balls of Fury,” and “The Comebacks” among others. The problem is that out of all the parodies to come out within the past few years the ones written and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are the least funny. You may know Friedberg and Seltzer from such films as “Scary Movie” and “Epic Movie.”
Yes, “300,” with it’s shirtless heroes, pretty much left itself wide open for a gay joke and that joke was funny for the first few months after “300” came out. After those few months, however, the joke was stale and boring, and here we have “Spartans,” basically that same long, extended gay joke.
There are a few other scenes that parody other movies, but guess what? They’re not funny either. Friedberg and Seltzer just have no idea what funny is, they should have given up when the disaster that is “Scary Movie 4” came out.
“Spartans” only succeeds in making you feel sorry for the actors in the movie. They have to have their image plastered on movie screens and have people look upon their body of work and feel pity. Friedberg and Seltzer were trying to make people laugh and they made people feel pity, I’d call that a failure.
The bottom line is that “Meet the Spartans” is supposed to be a comedy. If a funny movie fails miserably at being funny, what does it have to say for itself?
