Movie Review: Fired Up! (2009)

One of my regrets in life was not scoring with any of the cheerleaders at my high school. Actually, I didn’t score with near enough girls at my school, but that is another story altogether. In Fired Up!, best friends Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) don’t appear to be plagued with my problems. Having slept with the majority of the available girls at their school, their issue at hand is how they can get some “fresh meat”. Solution? Skip football camp, sneak into a three-week long cheerleading camp with their school’s terrible cheer squad and prey upon the unsuspecting girls in the squads from neighboring schools.

However, shortly into watching the movie, I realized these shallow douchebags do have a deeper problem, they just didn’t know it — they’re starring in Fired Up!, a movie that can be summarily characterized as one of the more unimaginative and stupid teen comedies to come out in years.

How can that be, you ask. It has the requisite number of girls (who look great in cheerleader outfits, by the way) and it has a simple premise that is easily molded into any type of situational joke imaginable. What went wrong?

Two simple sentences sum it up quite nicely. It is not funny. There is no bare female skin when there should have been.

First time screenwriter, Freedom Jones (yes that’s her name) should probably give up her dreams of a Hollywood career now. Never before have I seen so many jokes and adolescent sexual innuendos fizzle seconds after they’ve been said or acted out. Ha — let’s laugh at all the superfluous ways the guys describe the male and female anatomy. Double ha — let’s laugh at how many times Coach Byrnes (Philip Baker Hall) can creatively say the word, “shit”. I’d say triple ha next, but I do believe I’ve covered all the “funny” stuff Ms. Jones could come up with. Not good.

It also doesn’t help much that the main players in Fired Up! (Shawn and Nick) are pompous assholes and are generally unlikable to anyone with a normal sense of sensibility. Even the prized head cheerleader, Carly (Sarah Roemer), is boring and unlikable. The supporting cast is equally forgettable — Carly’s scumbag boyfriend, Dr. Rick (David Walton), is supposed to be Shawn’s or Nick’s nemesis (I can’t remember which anymore), but his character just made me dislike Carly more than I previously did. Then there is cheer coach Keith (John Michael Higgins), who is there mostly so we can laugh at the antics of gay guy and slightly there so we can get introduced to his wife and fellow cheer coach Diora (Molly Sims).

This of course is the perfect segue into pointing out the film has some great looking ladies in it but offers nothing of substance to the whet the male appetite. If you’re looking for a bit skin (admittedly, I was hoping for something), you’ll be sorely disappointed; that is of course unless a brief appearance of a guy’s backside fizzles your soda pop. What a poor use of Danneel Harris’s and Annalynne McCord’s assets.

So if you couldn’t tell from my review, I’ll summarize: I’m not fired up about Fired Up!. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day when a mindless comedy with a lot of girls in short skirts and belly shirts didn’t pay off. I can scratch that off of my bucket list now.