| This Week in Film: Disaster Movie |
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| Written by Mike Caccioppoli, Feature Film Critic | |
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The purveyors of the all-purpose spoof movie are out of ideas. Let's retire this "genre."
The only disasters in the film are the catastrophic events that propel the characters into a string of clumsily put together segments that bind the film. As they run through the city they meet characters from various films that the filmmakers have fun making fun of. Ike Barinholtz plays many of them including Batman, Hellboy and Javier Bardem’s character from No Country for Old Men. The writer/director team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer don’t limit their comedy to fictional characters as they also poke fun at celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake. The humor in this kind of film is really all about volume following the idea that if you throw enough at the screen some of it will stick. The ratio in Disaster Movie however is considerably less than fifty percent, in fact I’d probably put it at about twenty percent. Yes there are some funny moments, such as when the lead character Will (Matt Lanter) is addressed as “The dude that killed Star Wars.” Lanter is the voice of Anakin Skywalker in the Clone Wars series. Kudos also goes to Crista Flanagan who plays Juney, a take off on the girl in Juno. Flanagan is pitch perfect mimicking that characters annoyingly hip way of talking and peculiar body language. More Reviews from This Week In Film: |
I chuckled a bit while watching Disaster Movie, I even laughed out loud a couple of times, but as one young dude said as he exited the theater, “I’m glad we didn’t have to pay for that,” and that seems about right to me. The guys behind Scary Movie, Epic Movie, and so on and so forth are just about out of ideas and it shows. Since their new film is called Disaster Movie we would expect that they would be parodying movies in that genre. The problem is that there really aren’t many disaster films made anymore, so what we get is a general skewering of movies from Indiana Jones to Batman to Night at the Museum. Why this film is called Disaster Movie is anyone’s guess. 
