Epic Movie

Spoofing The Chronicles Of Narnia is a backhanded compliment. It’s a pity the jokes aren’t better.

Edward (Kal Penn) is Asian. Susan (Faune A Chambers) is black. Peter (Adam Campbell) and Lucy (Jayma Mays) are sliced white. They should be children, but they are not. In the film, they discover they are siblings, which makes the racial diversity somewhat surreal.

They follow the basic outline of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, except the White Witch has become the White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge) and Aslan is now Aslo (Fred Willard, doing his parody of a Baywatch stud who has joined the Viagra generation), half man, half lion, wholly up for it.

As they wander through the story, they meet other heroes, super and otherwise, who don’t make huge contributions. The pirate Captain Jack Sparrow is permanently pissed on rum; the X-Men say hi; Superman is shot in the face and falls off a building; Harry Potter is middle aged and Hermione pregnant; Chewbacca from Star Wars is spotted amongst the medieval tents.

Everything is conducted in the best of humour, which means the gags aren’t cruel, only palely loitering. Compare this with Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Epic Movie cannot keep up, not that the Pythons are so revered they rest in the Garden of Iconic Remembrance, but because writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer lack wit.

Rather than biting the leg off C S Lewis’s reputation and making a mockery of Narnia’s portentous religiosity, Epic Movie nudges you in the funny bone and laughs at its own cleverness - not.

As well as easy-over performances, none of which will offend a nun, there is one thing you feel grateful for – only one fart joke. For lowbrow American comedy, that is rare. Sadly, it makes up for it with tit and bum gags, but with Coolidge (Stifler’s mom in American Pie) on the team, this must have been hard to resist.