Fired Up! Reviews

How did I end up watching this flick? What the hell was I thinking?!? As you may have noticed, I often waste my time with some terrible garbage. I guess I’m kind of masochist in some way… Anyway, this is the kind of movies which, as soon as you know what it is about, you usually drop any expectation you might have had. Indeed, the plot was rather lame and the whole thing was rather hopeless. Still, I must admit it, there were here and there some funny things and it was sometimes so stupid, I couldn’t help laughing during some bits. As usual, I always manage to find some redeeming features even in the worst case scenarios… Honestly, the whole thing actually had some potential. I mean, those two guys were completely shallow and if the makers would have chosen a darker cynical approach, trashing the whole cheerleading culture, it could have been something, not really amazing, but at least more interesting than this. Unfortunately, even though the poster displays a huge ‘FU’, they still managed to get a PG13 rating out of something which obviously should have been R rated. As a result, not only the whole thing was barely funny, it was also terribly tame and watered down. Anyway, to conclude, don’t be fooled by my rating here, I was extremely generous, basically it is a really average comedy and it is not really worth a look even if you like the genre.

Fired Up! has a short 90-minute running time, but that's little consolation when sitting through something as bad as this. There was a point at which I couldn't help myself and I just HAD to check the time counter on my DVD player just to see how much time had elapsed and how much was left, and it just so happened that, when I checked, the movie was at 50 minutes. I couldn't believe that I had 40 minutes more to sit through, but I sat through them to see if this really was as bad as it looked. Thankfully, the film didn't get any worse in its second segment, but it didn't get any better either.

This film is chock full of heavily botched jokes. The attempts to elicit laughs constantly, constantly, constantly miss the mark. Ignore the part of the RT consensus that claims this film isn't as juvenile as many others of its ilk; the word "juvenile" is actually an understatement here. That wouldn't be a bad thing if the juvenile humor actually WORKED, but it just doesn't. Here's something I don't understand: Fired Up! gets a 27% on the tomatometer, while Miss March gets an incredibly low 4%. Now, I would never argue that Miss March was a GOOD film, but it sure as hell had a better handle on comedic timing than this piece of junk. The humor was equally childish, but at least some of the material worked, whereas Fired Up! is one failed joke after another. It was embarrassing to watch.

One thought that did cross my mind often while watching Fired Up! was that it's a great thing that Nicholas D'Agostino is a good-looking guy because at least he gives the film a level of watchability. Sadly, in the role of his sidekick, Eric Christian Olsen is far less appealing - all he does is yell and act annoying throughout the entire film. When the obligatory twist on his personality is revealed when his journal is read, all one can do is scoff, because there's no way the character earns this lame attempt at becoming more sympathetic. The girls would've benefited from more screen time, as some of them seemed to have the potential to bring some sort of humor to the proceedings, but of course, the film instead chooses to just paint them as generic cheerleading bimbos. Despite all this, though, the one who comes off worst is David Walton as the stereotypical "jerk boyfriend" of the girl our hero is after, and the problem isn't just that he plays a stereotypical "jerk boyfriend," but that his overacting is painful, with some horrible mugging for the camera and line delivery.

Besides D'Agostino's physical presence, the other positive that I can point out is that things don't unfold as you might expect with the final cheerleading competition (if they had, the film wouldn't have just been bad - it would've been vomit-inducing). But that's not to say that the climax is handled with any finesse, because the last few scenes (during which we get the obligatory moment where the girl finally dumps the jerk boyfriend and jumps into our hero's arms) are handled very poorly: the tone is off, and things seem like less of a "big deal" than they should be in a finale of this sort. There's very little to get fired up about here.

"You gotta risk it to get the biscuit."

Fired Up! might as well have been entitled Cheer Leader Movie or Teen Movie, because those are far more suitable titles considering the bottom-of-the-barrel quality of the film it's concerning. The only thing to differentiate this comedic dud from the likes of Date Movie, Epic Movie and Disaster Movie is the absence of the names Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg from the credits. Instead, there's a first-time director named Will Gluck, and a group of four writers who credit themselves as 'Freedom Jones'. Fired Up! is nothing we haven't already seen countless times - it's a watered-down hodgepodge of several other films, and the result kills laughter rather than triggering it.

Working under the assumption that girls are as stupid as cattle, the movie introduces Nick (Olsen) and Shawn (D'Agosto); two football-playing studs who have used up the reserve of girls at their high school, and are seeking a new lady-killing challenge. The boys decide to ditch football camp in favour of cheerleading camp when they learn that it'll be attended by 300 young women. They worm their way onto the squad and hence into the camp, then proceed to sleep with anything that moves. But trouble arises when Shawn falls in love with one of their team-members.

After a brief opening sequence which establishes the protagonists as through-and-through jerks, Fired Up! embarks on a profoundly unfunny quest to add any sort of non-sequitur to the mix; assuming that conventional absurdity will wash over audiences like laughing gas. The actors are visibly too old for their roles, but the jokes are older than the Bible - the film is a morass of tired, obvious and telegraphed gags, from the mascots who never remove their costumes to the cheerleaders chanting about what they're doing all the time ("We are eating, we we are eating"), and even a scene in which the cheerleaders repeatedly chant "FU!" for Fired Up...because the very notion of the girls almost cursing is side-splitting, of course. The film also relies on the outtakes-during-the-end-credits approach to generate a few cheap, late laughs...but even these aren't even slightly funny. How bad must a movie be to contain a dud blooper reel?! And, despite the presence of talent like Philip Baker Hall and John Michael Higgins, the side characters are never given a chance to make an impact - they have been reduced to one-note caricatures or, in the case of the females, personality-free sex objects. Masochism aside, there are also homosexual gags - primarily a constant suggestion that all male cheerleaders must be gay.

Among the biggest problems with Fired Up! is that it contains absolutely no surprises. With such a totally obvious plot, you'll be able to predict what will happen at every juncture. The minute Shawn takes a shine for his teammate Carly (Roemer), it's obvious they'll eventually get together. But not after she overcomes her Jerk Boyfriend Who Sleeps With Other Girls (™), and the Break Up To Make Up Scenario Because The Protagonist's Disreputable Original Plans Which He Decided To Change Were Discovered (™). See, the two boys wanted to leave camp a week early, but they realise they've grown to care about the team and decide to stay, but their initial treachery is uncovered and they have to prove themselves to the team. Sound like anything new? Combine this with the fact that Nick wants to go to bed with the "unattainable" camp counsellor who's married to an old guy. Care to venture a guess about how that'll pan out? A Frankenstein's Monster of a movie, Fired Up! has three things on its mind: showcasing the improvisatory "skills" of the stars, PG-13 titillation, and cashing in on a cheerleading genre that's already passé. In reality, these intentions add up to a big headache of a movie, with director Gluck highlighting his naivety behind the camera through routine shot construction and a permissive attitude with the cast, who all seem to think they're God's gift to comedy. Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen (aged 29 and 31, respectively) play the least convincing high school students imaginable, and they spend their screen-time mugging the camera. Neither actor possesses any degree of charisma, nor does the duo have the skill for turning bad material into less-bad material. Crucially, why should we care about these shallow douchebags who try to tap every female in sight?

It would seem that Fired Up! was intended to be a parody of Bring it On (the characters even view the movie at one stage, and recite every single line verbatim), though that's not for certain. See, the concept of a parody implies humour, and there's nothing even resembling laughs within this tripe. Making matters worse, this is an obviously R-rated movie masquerading as a PG-13 (ah, nothing like a smutty teen comedy in which the guys ogle fully dressed women). The emasculation is so painfully obvious that it calls attention to itself: characters wear clothes for skinny-dipping scenes, there are euphemisms for "fuck", and the sexual innuendo is softened. According to IMDb, the movie was submitted to the MPAA a grand total of 18 times before it was finally slapped with a PG-13 rating. A raunchier approach to Fired Up! may not have spawned a superior film per se, but it would've seemed more honest, and there would have been at least some guilty pleasure moments.

There's no checking your qualms at the door and riding along with Fired Up!, as it manages to be unfunny and offensive at every turn. Girls sucked in by the cheerleading theme will merely find out that boys perceive them as dumb-as-rocks sex objects, while the male demographic seeking raunchy laughs will find more original, funnier stuff in the first American Pie movie. If there's something rarer than a great comedy, it's a depressing one that somehow manages to produce not a single laugh (even with outtakes in consideration). Fired Up! is one of those - it's so formulaic, disposable and instantly forgettable, and even if you do find these gags funny, you'll be hard-pressed to justify why you found it at all amusing once you finish watching it.

0.9/10