Critical Reception
Despite being a financial success, the film received overwhelmingly negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film 21st in the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, with a rating of 2%.
A. O. Scott of The New York Times called the film "irreverent and also appreciative, dragging its satiric prey down to the lowest pop-cultural denominator" and added, "The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score . . . is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up . . . to add some easy, demented class." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle thought "only a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny or worth making at all." Describing it as "so bereft of anything resembling wit or inspiration", he wondered, "What were the perpetrators, uh filmmakers, thinking?" In the Los Angeles Times, Alex Chun called the film "nothing more than a disjointed series of scenes and references cobbled together as a backdrop for sophomoric humor," and Ronnie Scheib of Variety said it was "epically unfunny" and "unlikely to join the list of blockbusters it lampoons." The Radio Times said "There's very little that's epic about this senseless parody, but then there's very little that's funny about it, either... It's mind-numbingly, tediously unamusing and is so devoid of imagination it even parodies self-mocking films."
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