There are bad comedies, and then there are Fanboys, a film that manages to take the boundless enthusiasm of Star Wars fandom—a passion capable of launching multi-billion-dollar franchises, conventions, and tattoos on very regrettable body parts—and grind it into a humorless road trip movie where the jokes land with the grace of Jar Jar Binks falling into a swamp. Directed by Kyle Newman and released in 2009 after years of re-edits, protests, and Harvey Weinstein meddling, Fanboys is less a celebration of nerd culture than a cautionary tale: if you love something too much, eventually Weinstein would have found a way to get his fat little hands on it.
Still, credit where credit’s due: Kristen Bell rocks the Princess Leia slave bikini. But more on that oasis in a desert of mediocrity later.
Plot or Fan-Fiction Fever Dream?
The story sounds promising enough: In 1998, four lifelong Star Wars geeks—Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus (Chris Marquette), Hutch (Dan Fogler), and Windows (Jay Baruchel)—decide to break into Skywalker Ranch to steal a cut of The Phantom Menace for their terminally ill friend Linus. Their female companion Zoe (Kristen Bell) tags along, though her character is essentially “woman who tolerates this nonsense.”
It could’ve been a sweet, nerdy Stand by Me with lightsabers, but instead we get a Frankensteined mess of dick jokes, bad wigs, biker gags, and forced Star Wars references. There’s a scene where Seth Rogen plays three different characters, each less funny than the last.
When a William Shatner (looking more like Captain Coronary than Captain Kirk) materializes in Vegas to hand out fake IDs, it hits you: this isn’t a love letter to Star Wars, it’s a ransom note written in celebrity autographs.
The Comedy that Wasn’t
The biggest crime of Fanboys isn’t the clunky direction, the thin characters, or even the subplot about a dying fan that gets undercut by cheap gags—it’s that the movie simply isn’t funny.
The movie peaks with a gay bar striptease gag that has the comedic polish of a church basement talent show. Fogler, strutting like a giant toddler who found his dad’s cocaine, is less comedy and more an endurance test in human embarrassment.
Baruchel does his best impression of a caffeinated chihuahua. Huntington is the straight man in the same way drywall is a “feature wall.
Chris Marquette, tasked with dying gracefully as the emotional core of the film, spends most of his screen time reminding you that cancer is tragic—even more tragic when your last wish is to watch The Phantom Menace. Cancer took his health, but Star Wars took his dignity.
Weinstein’s Phantom Edit
Behind the scenes, Fanboys was nearly as messy as the script. Originally envisioned as a bittersweet comedy about friendship, fandom, and mortality, the film got hijacked by Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly demanded reshoots that replaced heartfelt moments with more raunch, more stereotypes, and less coherence.
So instead of a road movie about geeks confronting mortality, we got Seth Rogen in bad prosthetics and a peyote-fueled desert trip where Danny Trejo shows up for no reason except someone thought, “Hey, machetes are like lightsabers, right?”
It’s no wonder fans rioted online to get the cancer subplot restored. They knew something Weinstein didn’t: Star Wars fans may tolerate Ewoks, but they won’t tolerate their emotional stakes being edited out for fart jokes.
The One Good Thing: Kristen Bell as Slave Leia
Let’s be honest. The one moment that keeps Fanboys from being a complete cinematic black hole is Kristen Bell donning Princess Leia’s gold bikini.
For a brief, shining scene, the film feels like it understands fandom—the mixture of nostalgia, lust, and absurdity that defines geek devotion. Bell is game, funny, and somehow manages to turn an outfit that once symbolized Jabba’s gross fantasies into the film’s only empowering image. She doesn’t just wear the costume; she saves the film from collapsing under its own bantha dung, if only for sixty glorious seconds.
If Fanboys has any legacy, it’s that screenshot, which circulated on message boards and desktops long after the rest of the movie had faded into obscurity. In the church of Star Wars fandom, Bell’s Leia is the only thing worth noting here.
The Irony of the Premise
The cruelest joke of all is the ending: after risking prison, cancer complications, and countless Seth Rogen cameos, the gang finally asks the question we were all thinking—“What if the movie sucks?” And of course, The Phantom Menaced id suck, spectacularly. Jar Jar was unleashed, midichlorians infected the canon, and every fan walked out of the theater in 1999 with the haunted look of someone who had just witnessed the fall of Rome.
Fanboys unintentionally mirrors that experience. The hype was real. The cameos were promising. The idea was fun. And then you sat down, watched it unfold, and realized the Force had not just failed you—it had gone home early, leaving you with some goof ball grinding away in a biker bar.
Final Verdict
Fanboys should’ve been a love letter to geekdom, a quirky road trip about passion, mortality, and the unbreakable bond between friends. Instead, it’s a half-baked casserole of pop culture name-drops, dick jokes, and creative interference. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to apologize to the person sitting next to you in the theater, even if you don’t know them, just for subjecting them to it.
If you’re a Star Wars fan, Fanboys is like getting a toy lightsaber for Christmas only to realize the batteries aren’t included and the handle smells faintly of weed and regret. If you’re not a Star Wars fan, watching it is akin to being cornered at a party by a drunk guy in a Chewbacca t-shirt who insists on explaining why the prequels were misunderstood masterpieces.
But hey—Kristen Bell looked sexy in that Leia outfit.
