Disaster Movie Review

Parody needs a thesis about the thing being parodied. Airplane knows the beats of a disaster film so precisely that it can break them on cue. Disaster Movie does not appear to have watched its subject. The frame is a 2012 apocalypse and a young man trying to reach his girlfriend, but the picture is really a queue of costumes: a pregnant teenager in a striped shirt, a man in an iron suit, a superhero in a knit cap, singing chipmunks, a pop star in a blonde wig. Each walks on, is identified, and is hit by something. That is the structure of every scene in the film.

The deeper problem is that most of these are not disaster films. Juno, Iron Man, Hancock and Sex and the City have nothing to do with the genre named in the title, so there is no form being played against, only a list being read aloud. When a bit needs a punchline the film reaches for a groin injury, vomit, or an insult about a woman's body, and it reaches often.

What works is narrow and technical. The costume and makeup departments turn out accurate replicas at speed, the film is lit and cut competently, and the young cast commits to material that offers them nothing to play. The photography is flat but functional, which is more than the writing manages.

Opening weekend audiences graded it at the very bottom of the exit poll scale, a mark almost no wide release receives, and it has stayed near the floor of every worst of the decade list assembled since.