It is a futile endeavor to review a movie directed/produced by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the duo responsible for such “classics” as Epic Movie, Date Movie, Vampires Suck, Meet the Spartans, and the Scary Movie franchise.
This movie is what it is. Nothing I say will discourage those who like this sort of thing to knock it off, and those who weren’t going to see it anyway would still be wise to remain on that trajectory.
That said, I write all this since I did happen to watch this movie at the insistence of someone whose identity I will mercifully withhold. There are some funny moments in here, but too few, and too far in between.
The best spoofs of the movie are all the way at the end and involve franchises well outside the genre supposedly being lampooned. It’s not that the comedy is low brow, that is fine. Some of my favorite comedies are extremely low brow. It’s that these movies are low brain.
For instance, there is a scene where President Snowballs performs a monologue explaining how things got to be the way they are, and how the Starving Games began. It’s a direct lift from Idiocracy by Mike Judge (a Satirist who understands the difference between a fart joke and a fart…) where he details how people’s intelligence withered over several generations thanks to shows like Honey Boo Boo and the like.
I want to give these filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and allow that they fully understood the meta-ness of such a comparison. I want to, but I’m not going to. If future generations look upon movies like this with the same fondness that my generation looked back upon Mel Brooks and Monty Python, cinema and mankind are indeed doomed to the same fate depicted here.
The Starving Games gets a one out of five: BAD.
Vortainment 