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Epic Movie 2 out of 10
Running time: 1:26 MPAA rating: PG-13 (Crude and sexual humor, language and some comic violence.) Peruvian rating: Mayores de 14
Cast: Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Jayma Mays, Faune A. Chambers, Tony Cox, Fred Willard.
Director:
Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Photography:
Shawn Maurer |
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The other day I was visiting a couple of movie/entertainment websites – as usual – and found a story that I found pretty amazing: the team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg are filming yet another spoof film, this time parodying 300. That made me remember about their previous efforts, which include the unfunny Date Movie and the embarrassingly unwatchable Epic Movie, which is the subject of this review. Yup, it’s unwatchable. Yup, it’s badly-acted, cheaply-made but, most importantly, painfully unfunny. The fact that I didn’t laugh during the whole running-time (yes, me, the guy who has enjoyed and has laughed out-loud with all four Scary Movies) has got to mean something. I like saturation humour – the genre in which the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team were masters – but this kind of movie is much too stupid, containing dumb jokes and embarrassing performances.
Epic Movie recreates scenes from famous or popular movies with talentless actors trying to imitate the characters from the spoofed films. There are four main characters: Lucy, (Jayma Mays), who’s introduced in a The Da Vinci Code spoof; Edward (the usually-reliable Kal Penn), who comes via Nacho Libre; Susan (Faune A. Chambers), who appears in the Snakes on a Plane parody and, finally, Peter (Adam Campbell), who belongs to the X-Men mutant school. The four of them eventually end up in Gnarnia – horrible “pun” – where they meet Willy Wonka (Crispin Glover), Jennifer Coolidge as the White Bitch and Fred Willard as Aslo. Other spoofs and parodies include Harry Potter, Casino Royale, Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean.
So what is the problem with the film? Epic Movie is, actually, an unfunny comedy. And I mean, nobody, absolutely NOBODY should be able to laugh with anything that the movie presents. Yes, it’s nasty, but it’s full of bad taste and awful jokes, some of them regurgitating scenes and funny bits that have been tried with better effect in other films. When parodying well-known scenes from well-known movies doesn’t work, Friedberg and Seltzer resort to poop and fart jokes, urination, jokes about raw sewage, drool and vomiting. When done with wit and with the correct comic timing, these kinds of jokes can be effective and provoke mild belly laughs, but the way the filmmakers apply them in this movie only provoke disgust. During most of the movie’s runtime I kept asking myself: “why?” Not only because I was wondering “why” I was watching the movie, but also because I wanted to know “why” these guys keep getting work. They gotta be the unfunniest comedic directors/screenwriters alive.
It would be impossible to give a decent performance with such a crappy screenplay, and the actors and actresses populating this mess of a movie prove it. The usually-reliable Kal Penn (who was one of the protagonists in the hilarious Harold and Kumar and had a small appearance in Superman Returns, which this movie spoofs a couple of times) is awful and looks confused all the time. The normally good Crisping Glover gives a career-killing performance, making the viewer wonder why he appears in a film such as this. (Fortunately, his career is not dead; expect to see a CGI version of himself in Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming digital version of Beowulf.) Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler’s mom in American Pie) and the rest of the cast look embarrassed and are horrible, and most of them don’t even resemble their counterparts from the spoofed films.
The “film” also made me ask myself what happened to Friedberg and Seltzer. I mean, they’ve already made two awful movies, but they also penned – along with the Wayans Brothers – the first two Scary Movies. Those films were by no means masterpieces of comedy, but they were pretty decent, watchable and, most importantly, actually funny. I guess the Wayans wrote the majority of funny parts. Epic Movie should be used as an example of how not to make a spoof film. Recreating scenes of popular movies with crappy actors and inserting as many as poop jokes as possible don’t make a movie funny.
Yup, Epic Movie is pretty much a piece of trash. Believe it or not, I don’t like to label movies with names such as the aforementioned one, - mainly because films normally require a lot of effort and money to be made – but since this one is so painfully unfunny and unwatchable, I bet not much effort was put into it. The movie is so poorly made, filmed, written and acted, that it feels as if it was made directly-to-DVD by some indie movie company with a tiny budget. Avoid this movie by all means and, if you somehow feel obliged to see a spoof movie, you’ll have a better time watching something by the ZAZ team.
©2007 Sebastián Zavala - GG site