SmugKitZine
Tied for the best movie I have ever seen
ManiakJiggy
This is How Movies Should Be Made
Brennan Camacho
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
JackHammer69
The tools who wrote and produced this movie need to stop turning everything into a dance battle. It's not funny.The great spoof movies contain lots of great one-liners and little 3 second references to their serious counterparts etc. They do not take a bunch of Pop Culture references and make 15 minute scenes out of each of those references.These guys need a kick in the head.
TheMovieDoctorful
After sitting through "Date Movie", "Epic Movie", "Disaster Movie" and "Vampires Suck", it has become beyond obvious that the duo of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg deserve every criticism they have received. Their films are unfunny, unintelligent and unbelievably painful. There's nothing I can say about them that would make their work any more entertaining or any less stupid. So what do I think of their "300" spoof "Meet the Spartans?" Well..."Meet the Spartans" is Seltzer and Friedberg's best movie by FAR. Guess what? It still sucks. What saves "Meet the Spartans"...Okay, um...Maybe "saves" is the wrong word. Uh...Anyways, what makes "Meet the Spartans" better and funnier than any other Seltzer and Friedberg film is that it has an EXCELLENT comedic cast. All of the actors chosen in this film seem to be chosen because they actually fit the roles and have tons of comedic presence instead of merely being chosen for star power. Kevin Sorbo has some very funny moments, Ken Davitian of "Borat" has good comedic presence and I actually found the whole concept of Diedrich Bader's character "Traitero" (A clever and actually really funny jab at action movies which make it incredibly obvious who the villain is the moment he or she steps on screen) quite humorous. That said, Sean Maguire gives by far the best comedic performance in the movie. This guy is given a script that gives him almost NO comedic possibilities and can truly turn out some hilarious moments. There are multiple scenes in this movie that would have completely and utterly failed in any actor's hands but his own. Seeing all these actors trying so hard to make this movie work despite such an atrocious script not only makes me like all of them more, it makes me hate Seltzer and Friedberg more for not utilizing their obvious talents better.The biggest problem with Seltzer and Friedberg is that they don't view their movies as actual "films" per say as much as giant feature length comedic skits. Like all of their movies, "Meet the Spartans" suffers from this problem. Because of this, the film literally doesn't go 20 seconds without a joke. Joke after joke after joke is launched at the audience, and many of them feel rushed and without effort. It was like Seltzer and Friedberg just wrote down the first jokes that came into their minds without reading them over, fleshing them out or even double checking if they fit into context. And the toilet humor...Dear God, the toilet humor. The toilet humor here is so stunningly unfunny it could sink even an otherwise excellent comedy.And if the toilet humor doesn't hurt your intelligence, then the constant pop culture references out of left field most certainly will. Apparently, Seltzer and Friedberg are people who think that a Spartan elder inspecting a baby Shrek is funny. No context by the way, the elder just inspects a baby and it happens to be Shrek, complete with a Scottish accent. If the film is extra cruel, it will combine its toilet humor and reference humor into some of the most unfunny scenes in the movie (I cringed HARD when a cat took a crap on Traitero's face after he randomly turned into Sandman)Like I implied earlier, there ARE funny scenes in this movie, saved by strong comedic performances rather than an even remotely intelligent script. The "Deal or No Deal" parody, Leonidas speaking to the Prophets about his unintentionally homo-erotic battle strategy and Xerces revealing his blue screen as a secret weapon to create more soldiers are all legitimately funny scenes. Easily the funniest scenes I've ever watched in a Seltzer and Friedberg movie, but that's really not saying anything at all.So yeah, "Meet the Spartans" is a terrible comedy. For most directors, this would easily be the worst thing they ever created. But for Seltzer and Friedberg, this is pretty much their magnum opus, and almost certainly the best you're ever gonna get from these two morons. At the very least it only made me cringe a few times, whereas I cringed pretty much every 30 seconds at "Date Movie" or "Disaster Movie."
Rickting
A word to the Olympics: If you ever run out of clay pigeons to use in the shooting events, use copies of this monstrosity instead. Another dreadful spoof from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, this parodies 300 and other blockbuster movies. Friedberg and Seltzer are an enigma in movies. How do they find work? No-one likes them. Some like Michael Bay or Twilight, but no-one likes these horrendous spoofs. Meet the Spartans is no different. The next time Jack Bauer wants to torture someone, he should just show them scenes from this movie. A film so ludicrously bad that you chuckle throughout, partially out of disbelief at how bad it is and partially because you just feel sorry for Friedberg and Seltzer because of how bad they are, MTS may not be quite as awful as Disaster Movie thanks to a grand total of 2 decent jokes, but it is undeniably an atrocious cinematic work. The film is so thin that it's only 65 minutes long. To get this to feature length, the end credits are really long and extended with deleted scenes. It's bad. I'm running out of ways to emphasize that now.The jokes are appalling. They're overdone, desperate, often sexist, weird, juvenile and just not funny. If you do laugh, you laugh at it not with it. The direction is also painfully awful, and this is as artistic as a muddy rainwater puddle thanks to the directors' total lack of effort. The acting is expectedly terrible, and the film suffers in general from its lack of wit, intelligence, structure and anything to make it feel like an actual movie, rather than some cruel form of cinematic torture. It's difficult to pick out the worst joke, although the tedious, face palm inducing sequence of celebrities getting kicked into the pit of death, a silly slow motion battle scene and a GTA scene which just doesn't make any sense stick in the memory. The ending is not remotely satisfying and this is not just a terrible film, it's one with a sexist, obnoxious personality and something which seems to be out to ridicule the films we like in an offensive manner. It's a pathetic spoof with no value whatsoever. It somehow made $84.6 million worldwide. Depressing.1/10
Lammasuswatch
What can I say? How can a film be so unbelievably bad as this one is?Like other films in this franchise, "Meet the Spartans" was supposed to be a spoof on a particular film, with references to other movies or cultural references thrown in. In this case, the spoof object was "300", a cult film for some, a tedious pop video for others. I thought, just maybe "Meet the Spartans" may be more palatable than the pretentious "300", with some humorous spoofing added to the formula. I could not have been more wrong! "300" made its antecedent "300 Spartans" look like multi Academy Award material. And "Meet the Spartans" made "300" look like high art - a feat in itself!I didn't laugh a single time. I think laughing was supposed to be the point of it, but who knows? Indeed the thought processes, maturity, film-making skill and sense of direction of whoever was ultimately responsible for this dog's breakfast of a movie are not something I would like to investigate closely.In a film in which nothing could be said to be a high point, the really lowest point was an extended rap dancing sequence. (Don't bother asking what rap dancing was doing in this film!) This was an exercise in endurance - it just kept going on - and on - and on. And this sequence probably took up a tenth of the whole hour or so of storyline running time. Or it seemed like it did. But, I hear you say, the movie goes for 86 minutes! Well, after the end of the actual film storyline, the viewer gets to see (apparently all) the out-takes for another interminable period. Were these deemed too funny to be put in the film, or too unfunny, or too irrelevant? Your guess is as good as mine. The editor must have been barkingly high or dead drunk to have got through putting this film together.All I can say in conclusion is thank God I saw this film after taping it from free-to air television so I could watch it later. It allowed me to fast-forward past bits that got just too painful, and it meant that I never had to waste actual money on it. (Although I feel like sending the distributors a bill for my time spent and electricity expended, with an extra loading for having to work with noxious materials!) Not recommended! An outstanding candidate for the worst film I have ever seen. While the earlier movies in this franchise were often quite entertaining, the franchise is now clearly dead, and should be quietly buried for public health reasons.