Movie review: Date Movie

Hmmm....on one hand, I was really disappointed in this movie, but on the other hand I have no one to blame but myself. In general, I have really liked films from the *spoof movie* genre despite the high *miss* rate on the *hit-or-miss* scale. Some hits from this genre include the Naked Gun movies, Scary Movie I (and maybe III), and the best one, Not Another Teen Movie. Date Movie unfortunately falls in with Scary Movie II.

I know this probably means I think too much, but part of the reason why the *hit* movies work is because they pick maybe one or two specific films to take off and then insert allusions to other films. In comparison, Date Movie just throws in EVERYTHING from anything that may be classified as a date movie within the last 10 years meaning that there are a lot of 2 minute references to other movies or relatively recent gossip news items that might have nothing to do with the plot. The only consistent thing throughout it is that Alyson Hannigan and Grant the lead male character (I dont know who the actor is) are dating and wish to get married. There's a lot of sexual innuendo which isn't even amusing, much less funny. While Teen Movie had the foreign girl walking around naked and spoofed the kissing scene from Cruel Intentions, this movie had an old woman tongue kissing a cat, and the same cat having sex with a mummified corpse in a take off of Meet the Parents. That aint funny. Ultimately a lof of the jokes that might be amusing last faa-a-a-a-ar too long - like showing us the perceived sexiness of Sophie Monk, Grant's ex-fiancee.

Things that I remember being *spoofed* in this include
Bridget Jones' Diary
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Hitch
Kill Bill
When Harry Met Sally
Mr & Mrs Smith
King Kong
An Affair to Remember/Sleepless in Seattle
Pretty Woman
Meet the Parents/Meet the Fockers
Napoleon Dynamite
The Wedding Crashers
My Best Friend's Wedding
Pimp my Ride
The Bachelor tv series
Michael Jackson
Paris Hilton burger ad
Hugh Grant movies
Harajuku girls (Alyson Hannigan's sister in this is Japanese)
The Wedding Planner
- I'm sure there's more but I can't think of them.

There were bits that I genuinely laughed in - e.g. when Sophie and Grant are recounting how they met each other while he was a prostitute and she was the rich woman buying him, Pretty Woman style, and when we meet the Housekeeper Grant lost his virginity to. Anyway, after walking out I thought it was a passable 5/10 while Andrea gave it a 7/10, but since then I think it's gone down a bit in both our minds.
4/10