Epic Movie (2007)

Epic Movie arrived in January 2007 as the third entry in the Friedberg and Seltzer spoof cycle, a ninety-minute trampling of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and whatever else happened to be playing in the multiplex that season. Four orphans assemble golden tickets, wander through a wardrobe into Gnarnia, and confront the White Bitch with the help of a horny lion named Aslo. The critics were unkind. Rotten Tomatoes settled at two percent. The Chicago Reader called it the cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, which is harsh, though not inaccurate. It grossed eighty-six million dollars on a twenty million dollar budget, which tells us something about the audience and nothing flattering.

The cast is diverse in the way that spoof ensembles are diverse, which is to say incidentally. Kal Penn, Faune Chambers, Héctor Jiménez, and Tony Cox appear, and the film makes no comment on their presence. Tumnus is granted a life partner named Harry Beaver, a gag that lands as a crude punchline and carries no affirmative weight. The treatment of women is leering and hostile throughout: the villain is the White Bitch, breasts are deployed as a hypnotic weapon, and Susan's contribution to the climax is a vomiting punchline. Racial humor arrives only as celebrity impersonation, stereotype as shorthand. Nothing here interrogates anything.

The remaining columns are empty. There is no climate content. There is no economic critique, since the satire aims at other movies and never at money. Body positivity is absent, and the humor works largely at the expense of bodies and appearances. Neurodivergence goes unmentioned. History is not revised, because history is not engaged. And the film does not lecture. It has no message, no thesis, no sermon to deliver. It is a crude, disjointed assembly of references, and its only ideology is the pursuit of a laugh by any means available. In that narrow sense, it is remarkably free of agenda. The tapeworm, at least, wanted nothing from us.