Date Movie
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rated: PG-13
Website: http://www.datemoviethemovie.com/
Release Date: 2006-02-24
Cast: Alyson Hannigan, Adam Campbell, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge, Eddie Griffin
Director: Aaron Seltzer
Screenwriter: Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
WorkNameSort: Date Movie
Our Rating: 1.50
“From two of the six writers of Scary Movie 3,” promise the ads, raising the possibility that we’ll one day be sold a film “from two million of the six million monkeys who sat at typewriters and banged out Date Movie.” Actually, this one seems more the product of a junior high class convinced that chick flicks are STUPID! but lacking the grey matter to show us why. While it’s hard to fault a parody that’s savvy enough to cast little person Tony Cox (Bad Santa) as dating guru Hitch Cox should arguably be in every movie that gets made, including the documentaries his uneventful appearance typifies the movie’s habit of setting up promising situations and taking them nowhere at all. A handful of honest laughs in the first half-hour aren’t enough to compensate for the ensuing witless tedium. This is a movie that thinks a hit in the gut is a perfectly suitable punch line; as such, watching it often feels like enduring repeated blows to your own solar plexus.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.