Fired Up!
If
you have been spending sleepless nights wondering what would happen if the
Bring It On movies were written by someone who could… you know,
actually write… then congratulations, your long personal nightmare is
finally over.
The
rest of us will meet the news with a collective shrug of, “yeah, whatever,”
but still be secure in the knowledge that if we ever need a snappy, clever
cheerleader camp movie, we now do have a slightly better option.
The
movie is the film debut of director Will Gluck, who was the mind behind the
short-lived but quirky FOX sitcom The Loop. Gluck may very well have
written the film as well – the credited screenwriter is “Freedom Jones”
which sounds a whole lot like an alias.
Fired Up!
is about a pair of horn-dog high school jocks who decide to skip football
camp to go to a cheerleading camp – where they figure they will be the only
straight guys amongst hundreds of hot girls. These high
school guys are played by Gluck’s Loop star Eric Christian
Olsen (who is in his early 30s) and former Heroes regular Nick
D’Agostino (late 20s) – both a little too old for the roles, but they seem
to have immature down well enough (particularly Olsen).
Their evil plan is working perfectly – both of the guys are scoring left and
right – when Shawn (D’Agostino) falls for Carly, the one cheerleader who
seems to see through all their bull (played by Sarah Roemer of Disturbia.)
Making things worse, she has a complete asshole of an older boyfriend who
cheats on her (David Walton). Suddenly, it is about love for Shawn, not
sex.
Besides, the guys suddenly realize that cheerleading is hard, important
work… just as important as football. Plus, the cheerleaders smell better
than the football players. Thus the guys have to
decide if they will stick around for the big cheer-off or meet up with their
football buddies at the big summer blowout bash at the summer house of one
of their teammate’s parents.
If that plotline sounds a little familiar… congratulations, you’ve seen a
teen sex comedy in the last thirty years.
However, if the plot of Fired Up! is clichéd, threadbare and a little
dumb (and it most certainly is), the nice surprise is that the dialogue is
often snappy, smart, current and very funny. It’s almost like “Freedom
Jones” knew how stupid the whole genre was and he decided to deconstruct it
from the inside. There is even a scene where the entire camp views the
first Bring It On movie and yells out the bad dialogue in time with
the film – as if it were a midnight movie like Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The filmmakers of Fired Up! may very well be trying to be trying to
go the Rocky Horror route – take a stupid, bad old genre and then
camp it up smartly – laughing with it and at it at the same time. They are
not completely successful, they commit to the plot to an extent that they
can’t completely mock it. Therefore Fired Up! comes off as a weird
hybrid – is it a teen sex comedy or a parody of a teen sex comedy? If the
filmmakers can’t seem to decide, how can we?
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2009 PopEntertainment.com.
All rights reserved. Posted: March 8, 2009.
