It's not hard to see why Fanboys had to be reshot, the only problem is that it didn't need to be reshot, it just needed to be taken out back and shot. Fanboys doesn't have a script, it's a generic cut and paste road movie with the same gags that had already been done better over and over again in movies like Road Trip and Eurotrip.

The key is to throw together 3 or 4 annoying characters, which in Fanboys are the two geek stereotypes, better known as the skinny nerd and the fat sloppy nerd, with two more bland characters who are hard to even tell apart, except that one of them is burdened by the tragedy of his father leaving him 15 car dealerships when what he really wants to do is draw bad comic book ripoffs of Star Wars, and the other has one of those deadly Hollywood diseases that leave you just fine, except you wind up in the hospital at a pivotal moment, only to leave a few minutes later.

The next phase of the road movie is to have your characters, in this case four people you would pay ten dollars to never meet, stumble from place to place encountering wacky characters along the way. Fanboys is too stretched to come up with much, so it throws in a gay Mexican biker bar, Vegas hookers, Trekkies, and a relentless barrage of Star Wars cameos, and when neither Mark Hamill nor Harrison Ford would sacrifice enough of their dignity to show up, Kevin Smith, Harry Knowles' stand-in, and William Shatner, who are all out of dignity have to fill in for them.

Finally out of complete desperation, Fanboys throws in cameos from anyone in the Judd Apatow stable looking for a quick buck, which means we have to endure not one, but a horrifying three performances from Seth Rogen as three seperate retarded characters, all of whom wear bad costumes. When it turns out that he's also got a Jar Jar Binks tattoo on his back, that's almost perfect because he is the Jar Jar Binks of the movie.

Fanboys covers all that over with a thin layer of Star Wars references, with not just one but two Star Wars trivia contests, which doesn't move it any closer in the direction of funny. It also doesn't help that of the movie's 5 characters, only Kirsten Bell's Zoe is even tolerable, and that's a testament to her ability, in a movie where every other character makes you want to punch them in the face, hard.

Like every road trip movie out there, Fanboys pretends that it's about the lessons learned at the end, and the lesson as always is something about the importance of friendship. Which would be fine except that there are no human beings in the movie, just stereotypes and threadbare characters. And if the movie is about anything, it's about trying to repackage Road Trip with a Star Wars nostalgia label, while failing miserably.