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Epic Movie
Reviewed By Rich Drees
If a parody movie’s quality could be measured by the accuracy of its
production in replicating the films it’s poking at, then Epic Movie
is a pretty good movie. However, if one is looking for actual comedy
in a movie that mocks other movies, than Epic Movie is
woefully inadequate, an 86 minute borefest that doesn’t contain an
original idea or laugh.
As with recent
parody films like Date Movie (2006) and the Scary Movie
franchise – which writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer
wrote for - Epic Movie tries to mash together the plotlines
of a few targets. Four adult orphans (Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jayma
Mays, Faune A. Chambers) win Golden Tickets to a once in a lifetime
visit to the magical chocolate factory of Willy (Crispin Glover),
who locks the doors and won’t let them out. While looking for a way
to escape, they stumble through a wardrobe to the enchanted land of
Gnarnia where they find themselves caught up in a battle between the
evil sorceress the White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge) and the half-man
half-lion Aslo (Fred Willard).
Frustratingly,
Epic Movie features some great comic actors like Coolidge,
Willard and former Kid In The Hall Kevin McDonald being saddled with
such bad material that even they can't make it funny. The thought
process behind the scripting of the film seems to indicate that
scenes need only the basest of premises that remain unexplored for
any real comic potential. Also, the script doesn't realize that no
matter how many times it wants to break into a musical number, it
will remain unfunny.
The parody
movie genre can trace its roots back to 1980’s Airplane!
which not only sent up the recent Airport disaster film
franchise, but the whole stiff Hollywood “ensemble cast in peril”
genre. The writer/director trio responsible, Jim Abrahams and David
and Jerry Zucker, would go onto create the cult favorite Police
Squad television series which would migrate to the silver screen
for a trio of movies under the name The Naked Gun. However,
these movies were more general parodies of their respective genres
than pokes at specific movies.
Conversely, the second generation of parody films – from the
Scary Movie franchise to Epic Movie – mine their laughs
in parodying specific films within their stated genres. As such,
they generally come off as a random hodgepodge of Mad Magazine
style vignettes that only vaguely form some semblance of a plot.
While some of these individual scenes may provide chuckles, the
overall result never seems to jell into a coherent movie. Rather
than improving on this formula, this second generation of parody
films have become increasingly more self-indulgent, shoehorning more
parodies of recent films until the whole structure collapses in
under its own weight.
Such is what
has happened to Epic Movie. In the filmmakers zeal to cram in
as many different movie references that the whole thing looses all
coherency. Sure, blockbusters like Charlie And The Chocolate
Factory and The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe are ripe
for satirizing. However, when you are stretching your definition of
what an “epic” movie is to include such films as Nacho Libre
and Click, you aren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel,
you’re rummaging around underneath the barrel. |
