Epic Movie

If you are a fourteen-year-old boy, don't let any reviews, good or bad, dissuade you from seeing "Epic Movie" immediately. It's got everything: Gratuitous appearances by hot bikini-clad chicks, references to every movie with any saga-style ambitions that came out in the last couple years, people uttering catchphrases at inappropriate but hilarious times, annoying pop-culture figures suffering indignities, mild profanity, jokes about excretions from every orifice, and the evergreen staple, white people attempting to act like black people. You'll feel savvy for catching all the references, you'll laugh reflexively at the jokes, you'll be exhausted from your amusement at the end. Try to go see it with a bunch of your male contemporaries, so that you can go back to school on Monday and say things like "We must attack the White Bitch!" and then dissolve into guffaws as your math teacher looks on disapprovingly.

In the present saga, four orphans — Edward (Kal Penn, aka Kumar), the selfish one, Peter (Adam Campbell), the cowardly one, Lucy (Jayma Mays), the dumb one, and Sarah (Faune Chambers), the black one — are trapped inside a chocolate factory, in which they discover a wardrobe that leads to the land of Gnarnia, where the White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge, aka Stifler's Mom) has cast a permanent winter on the land. They must hook up with Harry Potter and then go to the hut of Aslo (Fred Willard) and deal with the depredations of Captain Jack Swallows (Darrell Hammond) and get through a whole bunch of break-dancing episodes somehow. Also Borat is in the movie.

Jason Friedberg and Adam Seltzer wrote and directed "Epic Movie," the third in the series of assaults on money-making films that began with the "Scary Movie" tetralogy and continued with the "Date Movie," um, opus. Friedberg and Seltzer participated in the writing of all those other "Movie"s, but  with all this experience under their belts, they have not achieved anything as witty or well-constructed as classics of this genre like "Kentucky Fried Movie" and "Amazon Women on the Moon" — it's not even nearly as good as the first "Scary Movie," in which the Wayans Bros. led the scripting.

Numerous jokes can be discerned simply from looking at the cast list, which features characters named "Ashton Kutcher Look-Alike," "Kanye West Look-Alike," "Crotch Bite Guy," and the immortal "Puff Daddy Faun." Friedberg and Seltzer compound this problem by politely declining to spring jokes unexpectedly on us when it is possible to telegraph them from hundreds of miles away. Editor Peck Prior (really) leaves a little too much dead time after every joke, which either speaks to overconfidence that the jokes would induce riotous laughter or underconfidence about the film's 81-minute running time. The seams are bursting open all over this one.

Still, what's spilling out provides more than a lil' diversion. An opening tale at the Mutant High School for the Arts and Sciences, "Home of the Fighting Wolverines," acidly replaces the ponderous self-importance of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters with the high-stakes cattiness of a normal cinematic high school. (Plus, the giant magnet that the Magneto character sports for headgear looks like a toilet seat!) The pirates breakdance to a parody of the "Lazy Sunday" rap ("The Chronic—WHAT!—cles of Narnia"), making for a wicked meta twist, and the presence of talking rodent "Harry Beaver" delivers endless laffs.

The four young stars mostly stare uncomprehendingly at the events unfolding around them (you can almost hear Kal Penn thinking "I'm in 'The Namesake' — I shouldn't have to do this crap anymore"), but Mays pulls this trick off with considerable aplomb. Old pros Coolidge, Willard and Hammond all handle their business well, and the movie even has Tony Cox as the White Bitch's henchman, who just wanders around beating people in the kneecaps with a baseball bat to hilarious effect.

That, plus the stuff noted at the outset of this review, should be plenty to hold the attention of all the fourteen-year-olds out there. The rest of you should decide whether to see "Epic Movie" based on how close you are mentally to being a fourteen-year-old boy. For example, I basically liked the movie.

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