National Lampoon’s The Legend of Awesomest Maximus
Year: 2011
Director: Jeff Kanew
Stars: Will Sasso, Kristanna Loken, Sophie Monk
Studio: Image Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 87 mins
National Lampoon is at again with their spoof of various historical film with “National Lampoon’s The Legend of Awesomest Maximus”. The film spoofs films like “300”, “Alexander” and “Gladiator’ to name a few. It’s directed by Jeff Kanew, who directed the comedy classic “Revenge of the Nerds” back in 1984.
The comedy is about a slacker general Awesomest Maximus(Will Sasso), who is providing with a mission to maintain peace with the rival King Erotic of Greece. But things go horrible wrong for him, when Prince Orlando decides to steal Erotic’s wife (Sophie Monk) to be his best friend. If things weren’t bad for him, he has also deal with gold digging wife (Kristanna Loken), who won’t have sex with him and a warrior named Testiclees (Ian Ziering) whom he must defeat to save the kingdom.
Going into this film, I had almost zero expectations that this would be a film that I would enjoy or like. Maybe it was the fact that National Lampoon hasn’t been churning out decent films that hasn‘t peeked my interest. To my surprise, I actually had a good time watching this film.
I thought, the direction here was very good. One of the things that makes Kanew’s direction good, he carefully makes the scenes funny. Kanew does that, by focusing on the character’s movements or quirks. He gets his cast to make their characters different from one another and have some personality to them. By doing that, it makes the characters funny and helps generates laughs. The other thing that he does well, he lets the lack of budget show in the scenery. I would normally be ripping into that aspect, but it works for this film. The reason for that, they don’t take themselves seriously. When you have a film that spoofing off other films, you don’t need to make everything look right. If this film was filmed like an amateur film, then it’s a different story. Here, it just works well with the story.
The screenplay written by Jason Burinescu does a good job spoofing the various historical action films. One of things that makes this screenplay work, the humor elements and dialogue is written in a way that it comes off as funny and not annoying. He does a very good job creating funny moments that makes you laugh. Whether giving a character a certain trait or the way some of the lines were written, Burninescu manages to generate laughs. That’s what you want, when your watching a spoof film. If the material isn’t funny, then the film is a failure. The other thing that I liked about this screenplay, the humor doesn’t get too gross out or raunchy that it turns me off. I liked, how he doesn’t go overkill with that type of humor. Sometime when it gets too gross out, you lose interest in the film. The only time that I felt that way was near the end of the film at the coliseum . You’ll understand why, if you see this film.
“National Lampoon’s The Legend of Awesomest Maximus” is a surprising funny comedy that has funny moments and will make you laugh.
Review Rating: Three and a half stars.
0 comments
Post a Comment