Friday, July 10, 2009

FIRED UP - piss-poor teen "comedy"

From the Director of the piss-poor DUMB AND DUMBERER and an untested writer comes a lame-ass teen comedy, whose limited ambitions can be summed up by the fact that the film-makers think the abbreviation of its title is funny. Nicholas d'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen (no you won't have heard of them) play two jocks who decide to become cheerleaders in order to get laid. Because evidently girls are attracted to guys who cheer rather than guys who play ball. But it's okay, because after an hour of weak gags about getting laid, what the chaps discover is that all they really want is to be part of a team.


The premise of the movie is paper-thin and implausible. Still, teen rom-coms - a highly stylised genre - have survived worse. What really does for this movie is the under-powered script (compare how the MILF storyline is handled here to AMERICAN PIE), not to mention the fact that the actors are at least ten years too old for the parts. What the director and screen-writer have forgotten is that the best lewd and crude teen comedies satisfy on two levels - they really go for the gross-out comedy but they also have an emotional pull. In AMERICAN PIE we laughed at the jokes but we also sympathised with the geeks. FIRED UP neither pushes the jokes far enough nor creates any emotional depth.

FIRED UP was released in the US, Australia and Kazakhstan earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK. It opens in South Africa on August 7th.

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