Meet The Spartans
.5 Waffles!

After an entire class of high school students showed up at the Friday 12:40 PM show I attended, I can only assume the Washington, DC School District now considers this movie to be history class field trip material, or it was senior skip day. Sadly, only the truants were laughing at the “jokes” in Meet The Spartans (remembering how these children are our future only made me feel worse).

In this spoof of 300, Sean Maguire stars as King Leonidas – leader of the Spartans, who is taking them to war against a Persian force that far out numbers them. Along the way, we learn about the deception and betrayal that could lead to his defeat, and see all of the potty humor jokes writers/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer could come up with (I bet it was an all-nighter featuring a case of Mountain Dew).

Will King Leonidas and his warriors defeat Xerxes (Ken Davitian)? Will you laugh?

You only have to wait 5 seconds into the movie to get the first vomit joke, and if that doesn’t drive you out of the theater and on your way to see Cloverfield again, nothing will. One of the guilty pleasures in Meet The Spartans is watching stand-ins for some of our most annoying celebrities (Britney Spears, Paula Abdul, etc.) get kicked into the giant pit of death, but I wish I could have snuck up behind the cast and crew of Meet The Spartans to do the same.

Friedberg and Seltzer are the brains behind Scary Movie 4, Date Movie and Epic Movie, and banishing them forever would save us from Carmen Electra’s annual lesson to young Hollywood starlets about what happens to your career if you don’t invest your money well. Seriously, Electra is a stunning woman, but she has been in Scary Movie, Scary Movie 4, Date Movie, Epic Movie AND Meet The Spartans. If I didn’t know better, or believed she was desperate enough, I would think she was dating Friedberg or Seltzer or both.

While previous movies by these guys often couldn’t maintain the main plot and parody, Meet The Spartans has more focus and consistency when it comes to sticking to a satire of 300. However, Frienberg and Seltzer decide the film industry doesn’t have enough targets for their stinging and cutting wit, so they expand their list of victims to include television shows, internet standouts, video games and commercials (mixed in with obvious, but unfunny, product placements). I guess 2007 had too many sequels, so the guys had to branch out to other mediums to avoid repeating themselves. However, they don’t branch out much when it comes to the humor.

Meet The Spartans is the same, tired, boring, ridiculous collection of jokes about every bodily fluid possible, a series of appearances by familiar fictional characters and celebrity look-alikes that doesn’t do much more than make them seem dumber than usual and some homophobia thrown in, but, as I have found with all of these movies, we need triple the jokes, and we need funnier jokes as well. It’s not a good sign when Friedberg and Seltzer use the narrator to point out some of the humor, because there is nothing subtle or witty in Meet The Spartans that might fly over your head. Surprisingly, they don’t even include most of the scenes showcased in the commercials and trailers that have been running incessantly.

Meet The Spartans is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and some comic violence