Two jokes told over 90 minutes of excruciating pain. You do the math.
Image Courtesy of IMPawards.com
Director: Will Gluck
Notable Cast: Sarah Roemer, Nicholas D’Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, David Walton
Fired Up! is a teen sex comedy that has had all the best parts cut out of it or edited out. Or that’s how it seems, as it should be a film filthy enough to get 100 year old paint off a wall within 20 minutes of its presence. As it stands, Fired Up! is a teen sex comedy without the sex. Or the comedy, it seems.
It’s a pretty straight-forward plot. Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) and Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) are standout high school athletes and first-rate Lotharios. Seeking a way to indulge in the carnal arts and avoid two weeks of football practice in El Paso, Texas. Seeing that they can spend two weeks in Southern Illinois with 300 cheerleaders, they talk their way onto the team and two weeks of bliss.
Really, the jokes should write themselves. This has all the setup of a film that could be as raunchy as Superbad with the added bonus of gratuitous nudity throughout. You throw in a sweet story about Shawn and the captain of the cheerleading team (Sarah Roemer) to give a story arc to the proceedings and you have an R-rated comedy that satisfies everyone.
Instead you’re given a teen sex comedy that has no nudity, no foul language and frankly no comedy. There are plenty of attempts at jokes but they come across without all the raunchiness that would normally make them funny. This is a film that isn’t structured tightly and doesn’t have strong enough characters; it’s clearly going for the type of comedy that relies on an abundance of great jokes consistently hitting to overcome it. Unfortunately the film has taken out all of them and substituted PG-13 versions of them instead. It makes for a colossal letdown, given the setup.
Fired Up! has one of the better setups a teen sex comedy could have and still manages to be so consistently unfunny that it’s almost a crime.
