Fired Up

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.

3/10