Meet the Spartans

Meet the Spartans is the movie equivalent of penis-enhancement e-mails: an immoral cash-grab from people who don't give a flying fuck about you.

Actually, I'll call it Meet the Sparten, as the marquee at the Bonner Mall in Ponderay, Idaho did. The teens working there didn't bother to get it right, because they know it doesn't matter. One thing aimless adolescents can sense, it's the indifference of authority.

Let's talk business ethics for a moment. I'm not an expert on them. I only know from firsthand experience that a company can legally fire you for stealing napkins in bulk, that the Family Dollar frowns on employees clocking in and then going down to the creek to get high on shoe polish, that gas stations do not like their workers to stick their heads into the underground tanks and inhale deeply, and that Hancock Fabrics comes down pretty hard on anyone who lets her husband sleep off a drunk under the calico bolts, even if she is assistant manager. That's probably enough to fill a book for ambitious assholes in airports to read with a highlighter in hand. It's not the kind of ethics I want to talk about, though. Let's leave that plank in my eye for now.

I don't think companies, like Twentieth Century Fox, have a moral responsibility to make good products. Their job is to make a shitload of money, and if that means exploiting the public, have at it. They might worry about shitting in the pants that is their reputation with a movie like Meet the Sparten because people will say, "Oh, I don't want to see anything from that studio; they always poop their pants." I doubt they do. Movie studios don't have reputations anymore. They're just commodity manufacturers, like Chinese factories making drug-laced toys.

In other words, the studio is off the hook for the pantload of Meet the Sparten and we have no right to get mad at it. It's just doing it's job. That doesn't let every fucking asshole involved in its production off the hook, though. Even if the studios don't have to care about quality, or have pride in the product, the individuals do. Thousands had some part in shoveling this massive maggot-infested turd down our throats. They are immoral sons of bitches, world-class assholes, and cock-swilling turd-breaths who only care about money. They aren't trying to make art, or you happy. In fact, if they weren't making god-awful dogshit like this, they'd be spamming your e-mail inbox for miracle cures, dick-growers or horny swingers in your area.

Not one person who could have stopped a hateful, homophobic, overpoweringly dreary pile of shit like Meet the Sparten bothered to do so. Man, if I ever wished for a God, now is the time. Just so there is a hell where these grassfuckers can go to hell and get their entrails yanked out through their nostrils every single day. Hell, I'd even take whatever god it is those smelly ladies in the Toyota Tercels with the purple "Goddess is Alive" bumper stickers worship when they aren't buying crap for their cats.

Fuck every single one of the pricks who pushed this piece out the asshole of Hollywood. Sometimes a movie sucks and you can see where someone tried. Not with Meet the Sparten. It's as cheap, sloppy, lazy and quickly-made as a movie could be. In terms of production values, it looks like something that should be shown on the first day of a three-day student film festival at a special education institution. It takes an extraordinary level of indifference for the non-retarded to achieve something this shitty.

Meet the Sparten is supposed to be a parody, but it's exactly what happens when unfunny people are allowed to work unchecked by people with senses of humor. The movie rips off the story of 300and then fills it with lame homophobic jokes meant to do two things: point out the fact that 300 was homoerotic, and remind the audience that gay men like other men. I'm not sure that either of these is supposed to be funny, but I can see how a twelve-year-old who doesn't want to be gay but keeps waking from wet dreams about humping his best friend would laugh with nervous insecurity. Maybe those boys are who this movie is targeting. In which case, the makers probably bought a lot of ad time during Batman: The Animated Series.

In the few moments that it isn't suggesting gay men are not manly, Meet the Sparten makes broad, weak stabs at pop culture figures who are as irrelevant as the movie. Ha ha, they put a hump on Paris Hilton's back. Ho ho, Sylvester Stalllone is old. Oh, Britney Spears acts crazy! Some impersonators who have so little resemblance to the stars of American Idol (the Paula Abdul is white) that the movie has to tell us who they're pretending to be say shit just like the people on that show. That's the level of gags, not because they're remotely funny, but because they're supremely easy targets. Nobody making this movie wanted to work hard. Hell, if hard work were required, the grassfuckers would rather phish for people's credit card information.

What the fuck is supposed to be funny? Usually, I can at least figure out what joke is being attempted and decide whether it's funny or not. I can't here. I don't see it, because they didn't write jokes. That was too fucking hard.

I sat through Meet the Sparten with forty teenagers in rural Idaho, fifty miles south of Canada. There may be no more easily amused audience in the world. For them, the Friday night options are: see whatever new movie comes out; smoke crystal meth and feel up a fat, toothless mate in the cab of a pickup; or milk-feed and bathe their 4-H goat. At the beginning of the movie, these kids laughed easily, but by the fifteen-minute mark even they knew they'd been screwed and the theater was silent. They grew restless and talked of calving, who now worked at the Dairy Depot and wondered whether Chris had any residue in his pipe out in the Ford. If you can't entertain people this hungry for distraction, you suck Godzilla-sized balls. So does your movie.

Of course, the people behind Meet the Sparten don't care. All they want is your money. If they don't get it this way, they'll send you an e-mail. One Finger.