Writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer make nods to a staggering multitude of movies and TV shows within a mere 86 minutes. Everything from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to “X-Men” to “Superman Returns” gets quoted, but Friedberg and Seltzer’s most staggering achievement is rendering “Epic Movie” free from laughs.The duo behind “Date Movie” don’t really know what they’re making fun of (since when is “Nacho Libre” an epic?) and approach the art of satire with an appalling laziness. Whenever they’re unable to come up with a decent wisecrack or clever gag, Friedberg and Seltzer settle for crotch kicks and testing the limits of fair use laws.
The script for “Epic Movie” seems to have been composted not on a word processor but on a blender. It’s as if dozens of better scripts were dumped into a faulty shredder and recycled into the entertainment equivalent of a Frankenstein monster.
The thin, clumsy story all of the referential gags are tied to involves a quartet of orphans named Edward, Peter, Lucy and Susan (played by Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jayma Mays and Faune A. Chambers). The four have won golden tickets (as in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), but the chocolate master Willie (Crispin Glover doing his best Johnny Depp) has used the contest to lure them into a grisly trap.
The four escape into a wardrobe and have to battle the evil queen of Gnarnia (Jennifer Coolidge, portraying a character whose name can’t be mentioned in a family paper). The showdown isn’t terribly interesting and is used mainly as a springboard for tepid bits of name dropping and pop culture quotes, almost none of which are funny.
Yes, the guy playing Borat in two scenes can sure say “Nice” and can sure wear the green nightmare of a swimsuit that Sacha Baron Cohen wore in his Oscar-nominated movie, but he doesn’t really do anything other than a mediocre impression. Friedman and Seltzer know the character is funny but have no idea why.
One of the first rules of satire is not to make fun of something that’s already funny unless you can top it. There’s a protracted scene where characters modeled after the ones in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” break into a dull, protracted version of the hysterically funny “Saturday Night Live” tune “Lazy Sunday.” Why pay good money to hear this when you can watch the original song on youtube.com for free?
Fortunately, Friedman and Seltzer give viewers a break from all the pop culture references by switching to sequences involving breasts and urine.Watching “Epic Movie” made me realize what a talented actor Johnny Depp is. It takes TWO guys to imitate his characters in this film (Glover and Darrell Hammond), and neither one has the wit or energy that he does. Note: This review originally appeared in CountyCable.net