Josh Levin puts a stopwatch on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Meet the Spartans: "Various news sources have declared that Meet the Spartans has a running time of 84 minutes. Some online reviews peg the actual running time at 68 minutes. I went to a 5:30 p.m. screening. After previews, the movie began some time between 5:44 and 5:47. The closing credits started at 6:47. After a cast-performed rendition of "I Will Survive" (note: this was a reprise of an earlier performance) staged on the American Idol set (note: not the real American Idol set), the credits ran over a black screen. Perhaps two minutes later, the credits gave way to scenes that weren't strong enough to make the first 60 minutes, including Spider-Man removing Donald Trump's toupee. After about five minutes of these deleted scenes, the credits started again. They moved at about 10 lines per minute. And, considering the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make, they included a surprising amount of names; I'm guessing 8,000. By the time the credits had been slow-rolling for several minutes, the other 15 people in the theater had gone home. As the credits continued, I put on my headphones and listened to some music. At 7:09, more than 20 minutes after the credits began, I was rewarded by" a cinematic vision of "a Stallone impersonator gyrating in the outfit Britney Spears wore to the MTV awards."
Granted, any filmmaking team that makes a habit of releasing its movies in January might as well have the words "Don't expect much for you money" branded on their foreheads. But just because Meet the Spartans--like another big January release, Cloverfield--is very, very short, especially in contrast to the kind of Oscar fodder that it's begun replacing in theaters, doesn't mean that anyone wants more of it than there is. Levin is moved not just to call the film itself an act of "consumer fraud" but to question the job definitions of those responsible for it. "Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it." Of course, a bear might have trouble making sure that its pop-culture references were so timely and up-to-date. Levin mentions that Meet the Spartans builds to the crowd-pleasing sight of President Bush getting kicked in the balls. "Judging by the respective approval ratings of Bush (31 percent) and the Friedberg-Seltzer comedy team (between 2 percent and 3 percent, according to Rotten Tomatoes), audiences would have preferred to see Bush, or perhaps even Stalin, kick Friedberg and Seltzer in the balls."