Friday, February 16, 2007

Epic Movie

For Gnarnia!


My opinion whether a comedy is a good comedy is fairly simple - even laughs throughout, and in having at least one sequence to make me chuckle so hard that my tears will roll down uncontrollably. I don't care if it's physical slapstick, witty dialogue or crass toilet humour. So long as my tears roll, it's a winner. But sadly, Epic Movie failed to meet the mark.

It's plain boring. Drawing its material from some of the largest "summer" blockbusters, like The Da Vinci Code, X-Men, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Borat, Pirates of the Caribbean, Nacho Libre, Click, Snakes on a Plane, Fast and the Furious, Harry Potter and Superman Returns, Epic Movie follows the formula of taking a mickey out of genre movies. Written and directed by two of the many writers who gave us Scary Movie (a dig on horrors, thrillers and slasher flicks, the strongest of the franchise and still going), and Date Movie (one off bomb, taking a dig on romantic movies), Epic Movie is uninspiring, and the jokes are very lame.

In fact, I found myself yawning at the juvenile antics on screen, playing up plenty of times at the expense of sexuality - big boobs, kinky names, and countless gyrating female bodies. Even Stifler's Mom Jennifer Coolidge makes an appearance as the White Bitch, as do many other celebrities having themselves spoofed at by lookalikes - P Diddy, Ashton Kutcher, Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, Samuel L Jackson, James Blonde, I mean Bond, even, and various Star Wars characters . Even theme songs from the movies get parodied, the most obvious being Teriyaki Boyz's Tokyo Drift theme.

The only kudos you can give to the filmmakers, are how they try to gel all these skits into one coherent movie - having all the different movies put together into a common thread is indeed a challenge, and you can't deny the effort. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe forms the backbone of the story, while the rest are scenes which tangent off, or brought together into the world of Gnarnia. The sets too from the movies it adapted from also get recreated, probably on the cheap, and they do look as good as the original (if not gotten from them).

To really make your money's worth, stay throughout the end credits which run pretty long, where you'll see three sequences at various points, and you can bolt out of the door once you see the jab on Mel Gibson. For those who want to give this a miss on the big screen, a word of advice, don't even rent it on VCD unless it's free.

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