The poster for Fired Up! places special emphasis on the F and the U. I can’t think of a more appropriate design. This is a film that insists on flipping the bird to ideological and creative progress, choosing instead to rehash tired formulas and embrace prejudice. To put it simply: Fired Up! is the most chauvinistic and homophobic film of 2009 so far. It’s garbage, and not even well-made garbage at that.
The plot is essentially Wedding Crashers set in high school, and follows Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen), two womanizing teenagers who decide to skip football camp for cheer camp in order to get some poontang. But whereas Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson at least had some level of charm, these guys are just plain despicable.
Shawn falls for Carly (Sarah Roemer), the captain of the cheerleading squad. Apparently, she is the only female student at their high school that can see through his BS–the rest find his laughable pick-up lines irresistible.
Unfortunately, while Carly is smart enough to be wary of Shawn and Nick, she’s too dumb to see that her med-school boyfriend, “Dr. Rick,” is just the same as them. In the world of Fired Up!, all women must (and do) look like supermodels, and none should be (and are) smarter than a fifth grader. Whereas the women in Wedding Crashers had to be manipulated into bed through lies and wit, the girls in Fired Up! are so weak-willed that they’ll go faint at the slightest double entendre.
As if that wasn’t offensive enough, the audience is also thrown a dozen gay jokes, most of them in the form of Brewster, the leads’ Indian roommate. The fact that he’s Asian (one of the few minority characters in the film) is evidently supposed to make up for the fact that he’s a living, breathing stereotype.
He’s extremely flamboyant, loves cheerleading and has no problem whipping out his penis for display. In keeping with the patriarchal status quo, lesbianism is presented as quasi-erotic, but once it’s revealed a man is homosexual, look out! He must be socially inept and incapable of keeping it in his pants.
Every major plot point can be predicted within the first ten minutes. Will Shawn and Nick realize the error of their ways? Will Carly be disappointed by their deceit, only to ultimately leave one douchebag boyfriend for another? Will the team somehow pull off the most dangerous move in cheerleading, despite not having practiced it at all? If you’ve seen any teen sex comedy from the past few decades, then you already know the answers.
No amount of talent can save Fired Up! from its own bigotry. The fact that the lead actors are old enough to have fathered teenagers is a good indicator of what to expect in terms of the acting–they have some chemistry together, but playing high school students isn’t their natural forte. Not even the sometimes-funny John Michael Higgins is allowed to demonstrate his acting chops, existing solely as yet another one-dimensional gay stereotype in the form of a former male cheerleading champion.
The directing is bland and the writing is offensive. The only truly amazing thing is that somehow the filmmakers managed to convince the great Philip Baker Hall to accept a minor role as a foul-mouthed football coach, to which one can only respond: Why, Philip? Why?
In a time in which women can (almost) successfully run for president and Milk can get nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, Fired Up! is just what the patriarchy ordered. We, are driving, we we, are driving…backwards.
Rating: 1/5 stars
