Never before in my life has a movie filled me with so much dread, and I hadn’t even pushed play, yet.  I was literally staring at the DVD menu, completely petrified at the thought of continuing any further.  I began to doubt the merits of Bad Movie March, and I wondered if anyone would mind if I just completely bailed on the whole thing, three entries in.  I was shaken to the core by the presumed terribleness that waited for me inside Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s 2008 something-or-other, Meet The Spartans.

But I persevered.  I pushed play and braced for awfulness.  And it’s a good thing I did, too, because everything you’ve heard about the “film” is absolutely true.  It’s a giant load, plain and simple.  Lazy joke-writing, lousy acting, and indifferent direction are present in practically every frame of Meet The Spartans.

For those who don’t know, it is sort of a take on Zack Snyder’s 300.  But unlike better spoofs like Airplane! or Hot Shots, which skewer pretty specific movies, but use different character names and plotlines, this is about a Spartan king named Leonidas who takes a small subsect of his army to fight Xerxes’ Persian army at the Hot Gates.  Seriously, not a drop of effort.

So basically, if you saw 300, all you really need to do to see Meet The Spartans is subtract Snyder’s visual aesthetic, add a few mentions of Paris Hilton, a hundred “jokes” about how the Spartans are gay, and a painfully unfunny breakdancing segment and you’re there.  It really seems like Friedberg and Seltzer’s process of writing “jokes” consists of, “Britney Spears, lol. Lindsay Lohan, amirite?! Gay. Bahahaha.”  I’m still not sure how I didn’t punch a hole through my TV while watching it.

There is an unusual phenomenon that occurs as you watch it, though.  All throughout the “movie” I could feel myself wanting to smile.  Not because anything happening onscreen was worthy of it, but because my brain recognized that what I was watching was at least striving for comedy, and wanted to reward it.  Unfortunately, the movie is so completely soul-crushing, that I couldn’t even manage a grin.

In that way, it is basically the inverse of the film that started this feature, Plan 9 From Outer Space.  Because whereas Plan 9 is, yes, a terrible movie, Ed Wood’s wide-eyed optimism and zeal more than makes its presence felt onscreen, and that’s what makes it a pleasure to watch.  It’s poorly-made, but it’s poorly-made with love.  But Meet The Spartans just feels cold.  And it’s doubly frustrating, because (and I don’t say this without a lot of trepidation) Seltzer and Freidberg could potentially be decent filmmakers if they just put in a little bit of effort.  I know!  It’s crazy, but it’s true.

There are several scenes early on in the “movie” that rather impressively mimic the look of 300.  They don’t quite have Snyder’s panache, but that was probably a budget issue.  The entire prologue, detailing Leonidas’ rise to the throne, does a surprisingly effective job of capturing the same look and atmosphere, albeit with some truly terrible “humor” thrown in (the wolf from 300 is replaced by a gangsta penguin, did your head almost explode? Mine too).

Or the scene where they force the enemy soldiers off the cliff in silhouette, again, is shockingly competent, until they reveal that a diving board has appeared out of nowhere.  Or the scene where we follow Leonidas as he personally shuffles several Persian soldiers loose the mortal coil.  They perfectly capture Snyder’s slow-down-speed-up style and the snap zooms in and out, but they lose that goodwill again when Leonidas shucks sword and spear for wet towels and atomic wedgies.  Their writing constantly gets in the way of their direction, that is until the end, when the money clearly ran out and they really stopped caring.

If someone who gave half a crap wrote a script and handed it off to Freidberg and Seltzer with the caveat that they could contribute no material to the film in question and they put in a modicum of effort, I dare say that movie would be… not great, by any means, but probably inoffensively decent.  Instead they continue to write “movies” that make lazy knockoffs feel good about themselves.  Watching this, I can only assume that the studio approached them, gave them a sum of money and a DVD of 300 and said, “Give us an hour and a half of film, please.”

And I can attest, with a clear conscience, that Meet The Spartans is an hour and a half long, and that there is something to look at the whole time.  That is the highest praise I can bring myself to give this “movie.”  Because despite showing some visual promise, it is nowhere near enough to bring this within the realm of good.  It’s not even enough to bring it within the realm of bad.  This is the film version of an atrocity.  From the rampant homophobia, to extended gags that are predicated solely on just finding the mention of pop culture figures funny, to the scene where Leonidas is training his son by performing an ever-escalating series of wrestling moves on him as his mother looks on lovingly, because ha ha ha child abuse, apparently.

And it made money!  Not a lot, granted, but enough to turn a profit!  Why do people endure this willingly?  Don’t you know that if you keep seeing them, Freidberg and Seltzer get to keep writing them?  So just stop already, stop until they decide to quit raping our senses.  Stop until they decide to try to make a decent movie, or scratch that, stop until they decide to try, period.  The choice is yours, America.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture