Posted: 02/21/2006

Date Movie

(2006)

by Michael Jones

The title Date Movie is a considerable misnomer. First, it should not be considered for any kind of dating activity. You will not, repeat, WILL NOT get any afterwards. You would have a better chance if you took your significant other to Hostel and right at the point when the girl gets her eyeballs melted out, leaned over and whispered, “Sometimes that’s me on the inside.” Second, it would be unfair to other films like Big Momma’s House 2 or Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo if you called Date Movie an actual movie. It’s more of a movie-loaf: a series of random scenes put together with no beginning, middle or end.

A quarter-assed attempt at spoofing almost twenty years of romantic comedies, Date Movie follows Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan), an overweight waitress at her Greek/Indian/Asian/Jewish father’s (Eddie Griffin) restaurant. She falls for the floppy Brit, Grant (Adam Campbell), but he has a hot best friend (Sophie Monk) who schemes to derail their romantic aspirations. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if this is the plot because one of the key elements missing from the movie-loaf was a coherent storyline.

The idea of spoofing romantic comedies isn’t a terrible one. A film like Not Another Teen Movie showed that there’s humor to be mined from the ridiculous plots of a genre (such as rejecting a girl because she’s wearing glasses and overalls when it’s obvious how hot she is). And it would be easy to argue that a film snob shouldn’t be critical of the writing/directing duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer since they aren’t attempting to make Shakespeare - which is true, since the four-centuries-old playwright’s shit and semen jokes were far funnier. But even by spoof standards, this movie-loaf falls down and falls down hard.

Like the Scary Movie franchise, Date Movie bases its comedy on cramming as many movie and pop culture references in a 90-minute period. But unlike its parody predecessors, Date Movie has no intention of exploiting the comedy inherent in chick flicks. The movie-loaf merely recognizes that My Best Friend’s Wedding or The Wedding Planner did, in fact, once exist as popular romantic comedies. It didn’t help that the pop culture references such as Michael Jackson are seriously dated - pardon the pun. Yes, we get it. The King of Pop allegedly likes little boys. How about an O.J. joke to seal the deal?

I wish I could say something nice about the actors, but the hack writing and direction overshadows them. Which is a good thing since this is a movie that every principal player would rather forget sooner than later - unless Hannigan wants to remember her halcyon days when she shared screen time with a cat that shits continuously when its not performing acts of necrophilia and bestiality.

Michael Jones is a film critic in Chicago.

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