Meet the Spartans

Despite the film's swift production, some of the jokes seem dated. In particular, younger cinemagoers may need to have explained to them who this ''Sanjaya'' character was.

To criticize this film for stupidity would be pointlessness manifest, the real question being: Is its purported idiocy put to a worthwhile use, or is this just another stale retreat of MADtv? Yes and no.

The humor in the relentless 300 spoof Meet the Spartans runs the gamut from S to R: It opens with a Shrek gag and ends with one about Rambo.

What's the point of making a parody that's dumber than the stuff it parodies? Meet the Spartans panders for cheap laughs at the expense of just about every vulgar excess in present-day pop culture.

Pop goes the weasely, media-blitzed culture in Meet the Spartans, a limp and limp-wristed spoof of last year's ancient battle epic 300.

Title notwithstanding, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's lazy, juvenile comedy takes no potshots at Meet The Parents. But they compensate with a barrage of "dude, how gay was 300 gags.

There are still more movies referenced than laugh-out-loud moments in this latest, a straight 300 parody that is anything but "straight."

There’s nothing funny here -- only sad. Sad in the sense that enough people will see Meet the Spartans to warrant a continuation of this franchise.

Meet the Spartans tells the same story as 300, so much so that it dances perilously close to crossing the fine line between parody and plagiarism.

The makers of Meet the Spartans mean to parody last year's hugely successful swords-and-sandals actioner 300; what they really do is compress that film's plot to 300 for Dummies.

Meet the Spartans feels thin even given its mercifully brief running time, but that isn't for lack of pop-culture references.

The film mines the historical factoid that ancient Greek armies accepted homosexuals into their ranks to create 90 minutes worth of poor jokes.

This thing is so utterly lacklustre, so without spirit or humour or energy of any kind, that the characters have to tell you what the joke is.

This "movie" was not screened in advance for critics, which as you know by now, means it's probably awful, unfunny and should have been dumped straight-to-DVD.