Metacritic Film

Meet the Spartans

Starring Diedrich Bader, Kevin Sorbo, Emily Wilson, Method Man, Ken Davitian, Jim Piddock, Sean Maguire, and Greg Ellis

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and some comic violence

20th Century Fox
Comedy
84 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters January 25, 2008

The heroic Leonidas, armed with nothing by leather underwear and a cape, leads a ragtag group of 13 - count 'em, 13! -- Spartans to defend their homeland against the invading Persians (whose ranks include Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, the Transformers, and a hunchbacked Paris Hilton). (20th Century Fox)

WRITTEN BY
Jason Friedberg
Aaron Seltzer

DIRECTED BY
Aaron Seltzer
Jason Friedberg

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

9 / 100

Critic Reviews

58 Entertainment Weekly Clark Collis
Less classic Mel Brooks than middling "Best Week Ever."
38 Boston Globe Mark Feeney
The best thing in Meet the Spartans is the swift kick in the bombast it delivers to the oh-no-not-us homoeroticism of "300."
25 TV Guide
The musical number that runs during the closing credits funnier than anything that precedes it, which isn't saying much.
20 The Hollywood Reporter
Writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer basically reprise the tired formula from their earlier efforts, which is to throw in as many pop culture references as possible to cover up the lack of any real wit.
20 The New York Times
Overkill is what Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do best: as the uncontested titans of the parody genre (with fingers in everything from the “Scary Movie” franchise to the more recent “Epic Movie”) they continue to prove that ridiculing other movies is much easier than making your own.
20 LA Weekly Luke Y. Thompson
Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.
10 Variety
Lazy, lame and painfully unfunny, Meet the Spartans is yet another scrambled-genre parody.
0 The Onion (A.V. Club) Steven Hyden
Meet The Spartans gamely alternates between unfunny gay jokes and violent pratfalls for a good 80 minutes, finding time for not one, but two musical dance numbers set to "I Will Survive."
0 Village Voice Aaron Hillis
Witless, tasteless, formless spoof.
0 Austin Chronicle
Hey, guys, when you repurpose a disco hit to poke fun at gay men, not only do you look like assholes, you look like assholes who rip their jokes off of YouTube.
0 Film Threat Felix Vasques Jr.
It’s rare that a movie makes me ill these days, and it’s rare that I can see a movie and hate the people behind it with such abhorrence, but Meet the Spartans rises to the challenge.

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