February is a drag for most moviegoers. If all of the Oscar bait has been watched, there's nothing left for most people to see other than garbage. Case in point, the teenage sex comedy Fired Up!
The problems with Fired Up! begin before even walking into the theater. The poster in the lobby of the theater simply had the title Fired Up! with the F and the U in letters that were 20 times bigger than the rest of the title, giving a clear indication of what the people who made this movie thought of the people who would be dumb enough to watch it.
Shawn and Nick are two high school seniors who are tired of spending two weeks of their lives at the sausage fest known as football camp. To escape this torture, the two randy young lads decide that instead of playing football, they'll go to cheerleader camp. The two plan to hook up with the hapless cheerleaders and leave before anyone's the wiser.
What happens next is straight out of the bad-teenage-movie handbook. Shawn, the sensitive one, starts getting really into cheering and falls in love with the captain of the team. Nick, the goofy one, gets with a lot of women. He thinks Shawn is an idiot for getting too involved with the team, but stands by him because he's his main dude. Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen, the two actors who play the leads, do show some actual glimmers of comedic talent, and the waste of that potential makes the experience even more painful.
Perhaps with a real script that didn't rehash the same jokes that have been told in every other teenage sex comedy since the '70s, D'Agosto and Olsen might have made a funny movie. However, they would have to play something other than high school seniors because they both look like they're 30 years old.
Fired Up! is the type of movie that's destined to be played endlessly on Comedy Central five years from now. There's very little creativity in the execution of the endlessly rehashed story of randy teenage boys in a land filled with attractive women. The only bright spots come from the misplaced enthusiasm of the two leads and the blissfully short running time.
3 Culture
Ethan Goldsmith
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