Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/27/07
Airplane! is one of
my all-time favorite comedies, and I've seen it dozens of times.
One of the things I always marvel about it and the other movies created
by the comic geniuses David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker is how
they know that things which make absolutely no sense are going to be funny
for that precise reason. Humor is so subjective, and never more so
than in their films and the whole “spoof” genre they inspired. I
try to keep that thought in mind as I ponder how exactly Epic Movie,
the new blockbuster spoof from writer/directors (and in this case I use
both terms loosely) Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, got made.
Mistaking references for referential humor, acted with an amazingly tin
ear for comedy, and maddeningly padded out with dance numbers and musical
montages, it is amateurish almost beyond belief.
The plot makes detours to
reference a few recent films but mostly follows that of The Chronicles
of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Four
orphans find Magic Tickets inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
to visit a cannibalistic candymaker Willy (Crispin Glover, at least entertaining
himself). They are Edward (Kal Penn), who lives in Nacho Libre,
Peter (Adam Campbell), from a high school production of X-Men, Lucy
(Jayma Mays), emerging from The Da Vinci Code, and Susan (Faune
A. Chambers), dropping in from Snakes on a Plane. Since Willy's
wonderful world isn't all they've hoped for, they're happy to escape through
a wardrobe that leads to the magical kingdom of Gnarnia. We're told
that the name is one silent “G” different for legal reasons, which is pretty
funny until we realize that almost all of the characters brought in from
other movies will use the same names as the originals. Gnarnia is
ruled by The White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge), who plans to gather and kill
the four humans who're prophesized to end her reign. They train under
the watchful eye of an old and seedy Harry Potter (Kevin McDonald), then
meet man/lion Aslo (Fred Willard, perhaps hitting a career low) and Captain
Jack Swallows (Darrell Hammond)
Scanning the Epic Movie credits,
I find the following character names: Mystique, Harry Potter, Ron,
Hermoine, Dumbledore, Cyclops, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Nacho
Libre, Borat, James Bond, “Ashton Kutcher Look-Alike”, “Samuel Jackson
Look-Alike”, and, well, you get the idea. That the filmmakers patted
themselves on the back after coming up with “White Bitch” (I'll admit,
not funny enough to merit even a smile, but not unclever) and then stopped
trying to even match the wit level of Mad Magazine in renaming the iconic
characters they pretend to make fun of tells you everything you need to
know about the shocking level of laziness in play. Characters stop
what they're doing and start dancing as through a rap video had broken
out at least once every 10 minutes (what is this, a hip-hop Laugh-In?),
alternating and sometimes overlapping with bikini-clad women dancing around
for no other reason than that there are apparently a lot of teenage boys
in the audience with no access to porn.
Comic highlights are are
so few and far between I can literally name everything that was funny.
The high-school X-Men episode puts someone billed as “Groovy” in
a very funny Wolverine wig and nicely riffs on the horror that might result
if 20th Century Fox ever greenlights that X-Men sequel focused on
Professor Xavier's students. The Harry Potter interlude takes
complaints about Daniel Radcliffe and company being too old for their roles
to an amusing conclusion, and the notion of Hogwort's beloved residents
gone to seed delivers some laughs. Darrell Hammond is our best active
impressionist, and even with no good jokes manages to craft a funny spin
on Johnny Depp's most famous performance. Kal Penn is a sufficiently
professional comic actor to occasionally get a laugh, particularly in the
way he reacts to being Punk'd by, uh, Ashton Kutcher Look-Alike.
Otherwise, it's a long, hard
90 minutes (at least 15 of which are credits periodically interrupted by
more dancing and wisely deleted scenes). I loved Jayma Mays in Red
Eye and on TV's Heroes, but what she's doing here is amazingly
misguided. Her lispy delivery and a running joke where Lucy repeats
everything Susan says just lay there from the word "Go". Campbell's
impersonation of the kind of British Hero Kid Performance given by William
Moseley in The Chronicles of Narnia is cute, but it has no material
to back it up (the movie is, amazingly, unable to find anything funny about
The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) and Chambers seems to be giving,
rather than spoofing, the Generic Black Friend Performance. Coolidge
can be very funny, but is the wrong choice for any attempt to mock Tilda
Swinton's excellent work as the White Witch, and probably gets the movie's
most consistently mediocre material. At least that beats old pros
Willard and David Carradine, who've done a lot of embarrassing stuff over
the years but have probably never looked worse than they do here.
Any Halloween party would be honored to see Carmen Electra turn up in a
sexy Mystique costume, but the constant cynical parade of pointlessly jiggling
extras made even ogling her a depressing exercise.
When some movies go wrong
it's hard to parcel out blame, but this time it's easy. The jokes
written by Friedberg and Seltzer are not funny. In fact, they're
rarely even jokes, just “look, we saw Snakes on a Plane, too!” moments.
Their screenplay reaches so desperately for easy laughs that it mentions
that we might remember Penn from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle
not once, but TWICE. On rare occasions when I felt the buzz of “getting”
a joke, like the Mona Lisa secretly reading “So Lame The Hair of Tom”,
they need to strangle it to death by cutting to a painting of Tom Hanks
like some kind of cinematic No Viewer Left Behind Act. And they've
directed a cast that is not only unfunny but doesn't even seem to know
how to tell a joke. And no spoof should be so contemptuous of its'
source material that it doesn't at least try to hit its' narrative beats.
Part of the strength of David Zucker's work on Scary Movies 3
& 4 is that he manages to deliver the shocks and thrills of
his targets, only making them laughs instead. But this movie just
lays there, jumping from one re-enacted sequence to another like someone
fast-forwarding through a movie they don't particularly want to watch.
Epic Movie is bad.
In fact, it's awful. But I've already seen it: the question
is, what will you think? The movie's sense of humor is pretty accurately
summarized by a single joke. Like his Narnia counterpart, Edward
is taken in by The White Bitch's seduction, and tells her he loves her
so much he got a tatoo in her honor. He takes his shirt off to reveal
the same back-covering tattoo 50 Cent has. “That's 50 Cent's tattoo!”
she rages, and he puts his shirt back on grumbling that he got the wrong
one. If the act of seeing 50 Cent's tattoo, recognizing it, and then
having a character confirm that you did in fact recognize it sounds hilarious
to you, there's plenty more where that came from. Along with a lot
of dancing. |
