Fired Up Fails To Fire Up Anybody At All

By Ned Hepburn on March 18th, 2009

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‘Fired Up’ is one of those movies that comes around about once a year pre-Oscar season that looks so immeasurably stupid that you feel that it’s a must see. After all, “Dude Wheres My Car?” (which wasn’t too shabby) and at least one of the good American Pie movies was also released around the same time; clearly the movie studios view this time of the year as a great time to release collegey-stoner-buddy comedies.

What these movies have in common is a strong belief that they are following in the footsteps of such low-brow comedy classics as Animal House, Caddyshack, and Porkys. However, the producers of ‘Fired Up’ should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking in that line of thought; Fired Up is so wildly unfunny that you’d probably get a bigger laugh from A&E’s reality-show-trainwreck “Intervention”.

The movie is based around the antics of two high school jocks who decide to enroll in cheerleading camp. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the entire plot. That’s about the information you’re given about the characters who are played – I’ll admit somewhat skillfully – by Nicholas D’Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen. They take the near barren script and inject at least a little life into it, turning the film from what could have been a comedy wasteland into an actually watchable movie. I can’t lie. There were a few laugh out loud moments (namely one characters totally random non sequitur about 90’s one hit wonders Chumbawumba) but the majority of the punchlines were so obvious you could tell what they were before they’d even gotten done setting up the joke.

It’s a big, bright film that’s trying to be a hybrid between ‘Bring It On’ and ‘Old School’ and fails to be either; combining Bro comedy with cheerleaders seems like a somewhat haggard and tired idea as it is. But you can’t blame them for lack of trying. The whole cast seems to be in on the joke and make the best out of what they’ve got. The cheerleaders are, well, duh, really hot, and the leads Nicholas and Eric do seem to be a good on screen pairing. But the whole thing seems so formulaic. It’s a disappointment. At the screening I attended that was mostly full of the 18-25 demographic the film so desperately tries to appease for two hours the whole audience seemed bewildered. There were a few big laughs, but on the whole, it was all bark and no bite. Kind of a shame… I think with a better script they might have been able to do something with this particular formula.