Funny Fired Up! Worthy a Hearty Cheer
At Gerald Ford High School, Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) are definitely the top guns. They score on and off the field with cocksure ease, touchdown and women as common to them as breathing oxygen is to the rest of the mere teenage mortals wandering aimlessly around the classrooms.
The boys and girls of Screen Gems' Fired Up!
With that in mind, the thought of going to football camp for two weeks and having no girls around whatsoever isn’t exactly appealing to either one of them. Instead, they come up with the fool-proof plan of tricking the school’s inept cheerleading squad into allowing them to accompany the team to their camp, a whole bevy of beauties just waiting for the duo to pluck them from sexual obscurity.
What they don’t expect is to have a good time, Shawn even starting to fall under the spell of the team’s suspicious captain Carly (Sarah Roemer). More, with the two star athletes helping them out the crew starts gaining confidence by leaps and bounds, helping them excel becoming surprisingly more important to the twosome as each day passes and the all-important final cheerleading competition looms.
This is going to sound kind of odd, but the new teen sex comedy Fired Up! is actually kind of good. The simple truth is that it made me laugh, sometimes a lot and more often than not also out loud. Dumb, juvenile and definitely nothing more than a throwaway farce I’ll probably not think anymore about after I write this review, nonetheless watching it was almost completely enjoyable. Even though I know better the darn thing worked for me, and other than a misstep or two towards the end overall I’m going to give this one a boisterous shout of approval.
It starts with the guys. While D’Agosto is the better actor, I’d be lying like crazy if I didn’t admit that Olsen continually gave me borderline hysterical fits. It got to the point I didn’t know what was going to come out of his mouth next, the young actor showcasing a linguistic skill set that continually had me amazed. No matter what the situation this guy kept making me laugh, his Jim Carrey-like set of eye rolls, shoulder shrugs, body contortions and facial gymnastics sending me into giggle-fits that just wouldn’t quit.
Not that any of this is rocket science. It is extremely crude and at times blatantly misogynistic, and every single one of the ideas presented in Freedom Jones’s screenplay can probably be traced back to a similar picture. On top of that, some of the subplots (like Shawn’s battling with Carly's pig of a boyfriend or Nick’s anemic courting of a elder cheerleading coach) go nowhere interesting, while veteran (and usually very funny) character actor Philip Baker Hall is stranded with a nothing role that adds zilch to the picture containing it.
Yet freshman director Will Gluck keeps the energy high. One of the minds behind Fox’s frustratingly short-lived sitcom “The Loop,” the guy has a knack for crafting an irreverent tonality bordering on the wonderful. The whole movie feels like a devil-may-care experiment, and from one moment to the next it runs on laugh-fueled adrenaline I very nearly adored.
Listen, Fired Up! isn’t going to win any awards and I can’t imagine that ten years from now it’s going to get its own sing-a-long montage much like fellow cheerleading comedy Bring It On does here. But it is funny, sometimes so much so it bust my gut wide open. As a whole, this movie puts the “C” in comedy, and if that isn’t something to cheer about than I just don’t know what else would be.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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