Caffeinated Clint
Will find its target audience of guffawing, popcorn-throwing teenagers. If you’re one in spirit and you find yourself in a silly mood while passing the multiplex, go for it. It’ll be the only circumstances under which you’ll enjoy “Epic Movie”.
Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Jayma Mays, Faune A. Chambers, Crispin Glover, Tony Cox, Héctor Jiménez, Darrell Hammond, Carmen Electra, Fred Willard, David Carradine
This is the second film from ‘2 of the 6 writers of the Scary Movie films’. That’s the way “Date Movie” – their first abortive attempt to be funny – was marketed.
The fact that “Epic Movie” exists proves only one thing; “Date Movie” was a fast and cheap distraction for 20th Century Fox to dump in a non-holiday season and separate those kids who weren’t going to do their back to school homework from their money.
It worked, “Date Movie” making back three times its budget. So smile in anticipation or cringe in agony, there’ll be a lot more [Insert your favourite genre here] Movie spoofs to come.
If you’re in the demographic the studio are aiming for, best of luck to you. We can only hope not all teenagers are as brain-dead, because this is so unfunny it doesn’t even rate as a guilty pleasure if you’re outside that demographic.
Using the time-honoured method of the spoof comedy, it lines up a handful of popular movies from a genre ripe for parody and shreds them the way we all do when it’s late at night on the weekend and there’s been too much beer and pizza.
But as many spoof comedies have proven, there’s a reason those sorts of jokes shouldn’t leave the lounge room – they’re just not funny.
All the effective parody takes place in the first half hour, after which the laughs either dry up or descend into puerile sniggers as the film leaves the broad swipes behind to enter the second act, trying to advance the story to keep the film from getting boring.
A good example is the “Da Vinci Code” send-up of the ultraviolet light message scrawled across the Mona Lisa. Instead of the Dan Brown-penned tagline ‘So Dark the Con of man’, the message is ‘So Lame the Hair of Tom’, and we cut to a portrait of Tom Hanks and his much-derided hairstyle from Ron Howard’s adaptation.
It’s the sort of thing that’s clever in and of itself, but would be far more suited to a series of short vignettes. The common problem with a lot of film comedies is the running time; 90 minutes is a long time for one joke and it soon turns stale. The “South Park” and “Mr Bean”” movies both suffered from jokes that suited far shorter formats, and it’ll be interesting to see how “The Simpsons Movie” fares.
Where most films are edited down to their presentable form, you get the distinct feeling “Epic Movie”’s original script ran far short and a mad scramble ensued to shoehorn mini-skits into the running time to pad things out. Most are in the form of the same tired hip-hop parodies you see in every silly comedy made by young white Jewish kids (recall the ‘Jive’ subtitles of “Flying High”), and as they frequently run to several minutes, the script has no choice but to try and insert jokes within them, and jokes within those jokes.
This curious structure of jokes within jokes within jokes as “Epic Movie” goes off on ever-greater tangents will however be lost on most of the audience, not having found the first joke funny and sitting for increasingly long stretches waiting to laugh.
The parody is not a bad genre, as the early Zucker brothers showed us. It’s just been put in the control of bad filmmakers from the Wayans’ brothers (“Scary Movie” 1 & 2) to Seltzer and Friedberg, whose idea of laughs is frat house toilet humour. Ironically (and sadly), even the Zuckers themselves couldn’t scale their old heights when bought back to helm the “Scary Movie” franchise.
Veteran comics like Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge are wonderful in the films of Christopher Guest, just watch their talent in “For Your Consideration”. A quick paycheque can be the only explanation for how they keep appearing in stuff like this.
Undoubtedly, “Epic Movie” will find its target audience of guffawing, popcorn-throwing teenagers. If you’re one in spirit and you find yourself in a silly mood while passing the multiplex, go for it. It’ll be the only circumstances under which you’ll enjoy “Epic Movie”.
Plenty of DVD extras – commentary; numerous featurettes, outtakes and an alternate ending – but nothing especially interesting.
Rating : 
Reviewer : Drew Turney
