A disturbance
in the force

Fanboys is a brutally unfunny
comedy about Star Wars geeks

NERDY, TURDY: Fanboys

by MALCOLM FRASER

Fanboys is that rare film whose title pretty much tells you everything you need to know. If you’re an arrested-adolescent male virgin who still lives at home and plays with Star Wars toys, read no further—the movie is by, for and about people just like you. If, on the other hand, you find it pathetic that this kind of person exists, let alone that they’d be worth making a movie about, you’ll feel some of my pain in having to sit through this.

Finally released after years of wrangling with mogul Harvey Weinstein, it’s an amateurishly directed, agonizingly unfunny comedy (think gay jokes, guys getting kicked in the balls, recycled gags and lots, I mean lots, of Star Wars geek talk). Set in 1998, it finds a group of nerds taking a road trip to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to steal an advance copy of The Phantom Menace.

Sam Huntington plays the main character, who evinces some vague audience identification having (partially) outgrown the fanboy scene. He tags along on the trip after finding out that his onetime best pal Linus (Christopher Marquette) has terminal cancer. Apparently it’s the same kind of cancer that afflicts Joshua Jackson in One Week—the kind where you have days to live despite showing no symptoms and being able to run and jump.

The other geeks are played by Dan Fogler, who adds some Curtis Armstrong-esque energy to the dismal exercise, and Montreal’s Jay Baruchel. Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell appears, tragically, as a token chick. Seth Rogen turns up (despite his high billing, it’s actually a brief cameo), along with some other comic talents who should have known better and a couple of sci-fi hasbeens in “funny” walk-ons.

In a perfect world, everyone responsible for this film would be condemned to life in a cinematic gulag. I would be certain to include in the sentencing Kevin Spacey (whose co-production of the film puts the final nail in the coffin of his credibility), Kevin Smith (who made it socially acceptable to fill movies with Star Wars jokes, and who also cameos here) and of course, George Lucas himself (who’s personally responsible for wasting more brain cells than all the world’s fields of weed).

FANBOYS OPENS THIS FRIDAY, APRIL 3