(2008)
1
Jason Buchanan
Disaster Movie couldn't have been more appropriately titled had the producers just thrown their arms up in defeat and released it into theaters as the infinitely more honest but slightly cumbersome "Ponderous String of Poorly Executed Pop Culture References That May Have Been Amusing If They Weren't So Painfully Unfunny." Seriously, if this is what passes for comedy, maybe it's time to take a moment and really think about where we're headed as a culture. Warring civilizations may destroy each other by the busload while feuding over which deity to worship, but perhaps if we could convince them all to gather in one theater for a screening of Disaster Movie, their shared distain for the film would be enough to get everyone working toward the common goal of ensuring that audiences are never again subjected to such inane excrement. Ultimately, this could open the door for new dialogue and maybe, just maybe, serve to usher in an unprecedented era of peace on earth. These would be the only circumstances that could possibly justify the existence of this movie.
There was a time not so long ago when writers actually had to sit down and dream up enough jokes fill a feature-length film; Disaster Movie seems to have been "written" by scribbling the names of last year's most popular movies in a series of paper scraps, tossing them into a hat, then dumping the whole mess onto the floor and hiring a seven-year-old to string them together and toss in a poop joke. The random celebrity impersonations are often so amateurish that names are constantly being dropped just to ensure that the audience knows who's being parodied, each scene seems to go on for an eternity, and the idea of something falling out of the sky and crushing someone must have seemed so funny to co-writers/co-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer that they repeat that familiar gag at least a half-dozen times with various earthbound objects. A High School Musical parody wears out its welcome after two minutes and then goes on for what feels like another ten (that's not even counting an extended recurrence just before the end credits), and a scene with a princess carjacking Speed Racer aims for absurdity while achieving little more than awkward, pointless violence (and this coming from a writer who gave Funny Games a positive review). It would be far too time-consuming to clank away at the keyboard citing every reason why Disaster Movie doesn't work, so in order save the reader from sorting through the depressing details we'll just stick with the one that matters most: it's not funny.
Disaster Movie on AllMovie
Disaster Movie (2008)
