Meet the Spartans – reviewed by Mark Burns
A spoof this bad is enough to make Young Frankenstein put a Naked Gun to his head.
How do you know a movie is irredeemably awful? When preteens sit silent and leave grumbling about a wasted five-dollar matinee.
300 serves as the base for this spoof of all things Hollywood spanning the past two years. In this one, Leonidas literally skips forth with 13 “latently gay” Spartans to the Hot Gates, where they’ll battle Xerxes’ hordes in dance-off, trash talk and occasional violence while consistently being pestered with digs at how gay they are. The traitor hunchback is a Paris Hilton look-alike, Kevin Sorbo plays the Spartans’ captain and … well, it doesn’t merit detailed summary.
This is the latest film belched out by the machine that is writer/director duo Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the guys who brought you the Scary/Epic/Date Movie series. As their No. 1 showing at the box office on opening weekend can attest, they’ve come to dominate the spoof scene. Their brand of comedy dredges celebrity gossip and blockbusters for material, blending Hollywood’s illusory and real worlds together in disjointed lampoon. Targeted this time around are Ugly Betty, Paris Hilton, Transformers, Britney Spears, Shrek 3, Stomp the Yard and Happy Feet among others.
The result has all the focus of a troubled child who’s traded his Ritalin for Pop Rocks and gone on a sugar-rush bender. It’s a shame. Giants-of-spoof Zucker and Brooks knew how to craft original storylines that tackled a theme or particular target, whether Airplane’s lampoon of disaster movies or Robin Hood: Men in Tights’ lampoon of the folk hero’s broad filmic history. These filmmakers relied on their audiences’ awareness and left viewers to decipher the spoof, thus letting them in on the joke. Direct outside references were kept spare, often relegated to Easter-egg gags in the background (i.e.: the Rocky poster in Airplane II).
Friedberg and Seltzer, however, ignore craft and context, simply stitching together a patchwork of direct rip-offs from disparate films and dimming them down. They’re like annoying children who think repeating someone else’s phrase in an annoying voice equates to witty retort. Even the most obvious spoofery is hammered home with repetitive jibes and dunce-worthy exposition. When a film is being targeted, its title is dumbly inserted into the dialogue so the fans, presumed stupid by the filmmakers, get it. Celebrity impersonations crop up almost as randomly as the product placements and are unfailingly idiotic, executed with less nuance than even Mad TV could muster.
If any skill manifests through the course of this movie, it’s in the occasionally accurate mimicry of 300’s camera work. Also, some gags start out amusing before being hammered to death. At the outset of such moments the bare glint of a smile may appear at the corner of the mouth. But this is a rare anomaly and might just be gas.
In short, Meet the Spartans fires a scattershot of stupidity with hopes of striking funny. The attempt misses wide. It’s enough to make Young Frankenstein put a Naked Gun to his head.
Horrible spoof • PG-13 • 84 min.
Michael Clayton – Jonathan Parker
This character-driven conspiracy tale wins us over with strong performances and story nuances.
George Clooney stars as a law firm problem solver stuck in the middle of professional and personal intrigue in the involving drama Michael Clayton. First-time director Tony Gilroy (screenwriter for the Bourne movies) gives us a character-driven conspiracy tale that wins us over with strong performances and story nuances.
Michael Clayton (Clooney) works for a large corporate law firm; however no one in the firm but a select handful of people is exactly sure what he does. He is a guy who gets a call on his cell phone in the middle of the night from a colleague and moves instantly into action. His action: to fix problems. He is part lawyer and part cop, but really neither. He is a fixer.
Fortunately for us, Clayton is not a smug, know it all. Nor is he the superman of fixers. Far from it. Indeed, we connect with Clayton because he is human. He seems in over his head. Yet he soldiers on to do what he does best: Smooth things over and make sure things go the way his law firm wants. Plus, he has faults: a failed marriage, an unsuccessful business venture, a gambling problem. Clayton doesn’t allow these things to overwhelm him, however. Nope, he soldiers on, as humans do.
Meanwhile, Clayton’s law firm’s biggest client, a global agri-business company, has been doing something bad. The firm’s top lawyer and Clayton confidante (Tom Wilkinson) has snapped because of the enormity of it. The question: Can Clayton fix these problems? Answering that question brings up a couple of new ones: How long can he soldier on? Where will all this soldiering take him?
This film’s strength comes from its utter resistance to turn itself into either a stylish action film or a plot-twisting whodunit. Reminiscent of many of the 1970s films by New York directors (think Sidney Lumet more than Martin Scorsese), Michael Clayton is character driven, not plot driven. Thus, the film is motored by the actors’ impressive performances, most notably Clooney and Wilkinson, but really on down the line. The plot payoff at the end is both disappointing and trite, perhaps a victim of the film’s focus on character over storyline. Regardless, involving adult films like this are rare in Hollywood these days. Michael Clayton is a winner.
Good drama • R • 120 mins.