Who among you is "fired up" to see Fired Up!?
I see no hands. Good, let's keep it that way. Fired Up! is either a monstrous practical joke with itself as the punchline or a cunning ploy to be the first teen sex comedy without any of the sex, drinking, and underage crimes that we all hate and would never want to see on the big screen. But that's impossible -- why on earth would a movie want to imply its characters are doing all those things without actually showing any of it?
To maintain a PG-13 rating, you say? But unless a movie was more concerned with cramming 14-year-olds into its seats than with being good or funny, that makes no sense at all. Look, this is all way over my head. Right now, I'm a little more concerned with finding the right spot to drive my car into the river so I can inhale water until I've forgotten everything I just saw.
In Fired Up!, Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto are immensely popular high school football players who will use any trick to get a girl into bed. Yes, life is pretty sweet when you're a colossal asshole, but tragedy strikes when football camp rolls around, meaning a never-ending three-week marathon with no girls whatsoever.
Rather than killing themselves then and there, they decide to attend cheerleading camp instead, which is pretty much nothing but girls. With no competition from other dudes, their plan goes off without a hitch.
Until they find themselves caring about becoming good cheerleaders -- and D'Agosto swears off his womanizing to pursue Sarah Roemer, their foxy team captain who's been suspicious of their plan all along.
In other words, douchebags try to game the system and instead learn the valuable lesson of shutting up, falling in love, and doing exactly what everyone else is doing. The staggering originality of Fired Up! doesn't stop there; it also finds time to be a "losers pull together as a team" sports movie and a veritable Noah's Ark of exhausted stereotypes.
Yet it isn't immediately obvious that the movie will end up throwing shame upon the entire human race. For a brief window, there is the glimmer of potential when a couple jokes are made that sound as if they're actually funny. Of course, this is impossible, because director Will Gluck is busy commanding Olsen to do his best minor-league Ryan Reynolds impression while everyone else holds an ongoing competition for "Mr. and Mrs. Loud, Obnoxious Horrowshow." In this toxic environment, any flower of comedy is poisoned before it can take root.
But that's OK, because it turns out writer Freedom Jones has a real bad case of Internet Writer's Disease. A recent phenomenon, the best example of which is Juno, this condition occurs when a writer has spent years being the wittiest boy or girl on the blog, then takes their cheap irony and clever-clever banter to the big show only to discover they're a moron.
For instance, remember Chumbawumba? So does Fired Up!. Pickup lines are endlessly hilarious, too, right? Also, and this is a little-known trade secret, but it turns out lame catchphrases masquerading as jokes are even funnier the fifth time you repeat them. Crude exaggerations of things such as gay male cheerleaders are pretty damn great, too.
The funniest moments are its unintentional ones, like when D'Agosto tells his cheer team the way to succeed is to be a cocky prick, unaware just how badly this technique has been failing him and Olsen all along. The bitterest irony of all is when the two of them exhort their team to take big gambles or go home. With its scant, predictable plot, cheap and tame jokes, stock characters, and aura of meaninglessness, Fired Up! takes no risks at all.
Grade: D-