Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Fired Up

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss it over German SweetTarts. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing Fired Up, a teen sex comedy set at a high school cheerleading camp starring Vaughn from Community. The below discussion contains heavy spoilers.

Next Week: The Salton Sea. Val Kilmer and Vincent D'Onofrio lead a heavyweight cast in this neo-noir directed by D.J. Caruso.

SPOILERS BELOW (eh, not really)

Ben: I may have ruined this movie for myself because just before turning it on I was watching an Arrested Development box set, and compared to that most attempts at comedy will fall disastrously short. Anyway, I’d like to start with a few facts. Someone actually wrote this movie. Then people with money decided to finance it. And apparently, people actually paid money to see it. All of these things actually happened.

First of all, let me start with the positives - this will be over in a minute. At least they didn’t have the two protagonists (played in stunning two dimensions by Eric Christian Olson and Nicholas D’Agosto) dress up like women when they went to cheerleader camp because I might have just turned it off immediately if that were the case. Also, Dr. Rick cracked me up. He had several hilarious lines (“Robert De Niro, Meet the Parents reference, LOVE IT!”) and his choice of music was pretty awesome. This character is an excellent mockery of teen comedy villains, which I think was intentional. Fired Up pokes fun at the genre it belongs to several times, but never seems to take the risk that it aspires to. The sensitive main character gets the nice girl; the asshole friend gets the freaky chick and the side characters do weird side character shit. There are multiple gay people as well, it’s crazy.

Despite my jab at the two leads earlier, they aren’t terrible. They have a funny line here and there, but nothing that would ever stick with you. This is basically a neutered American Pie script without any believable or likeable characters. Truly effective comedies feature jokes that enhance the story, while movies like this feature a plot that is simply an excuse for cliché jokes to be played out. Just once, I wish one of these raunchfest shitburger movies took it to the next level and made no attempt to resolve everything in a tidy bow. As an audience we don’t need it, because we’re never given any reason to care.

They only did this for the girls too

Jeremiah: It’s interesting that Ben referred to this as a “neutered American Pie” because I spent much of the movie thinking that this is actually the anti-American Pie, and I’m very thankful for that. The American Pie model for comedy bases at least 75% of the laughs around a few big gross out gags, like someone drinking semen out of a keg cup or gluing their hand to their penis. The actors are asked to do the bare minimum (only Sean William Scott really stands out, in a performance that makes those in Fired Up look subtle and nuanced). The selling points here, on the other hand, are an amusing self awareness, a multitude of funny lines, and three strong performances (from the leads and David Walton as Dr. Rick).

I agree with Ben that the “plot” here only serves as an excuse for an endless stream of jokes and gags. Many of those come at the expense of the plot though, so the inevitability of the cliché-ridden story is certainly intentional. In these movies, the evil boyfriend is usually such a jerk it’s hard to imagine why the sweet girl would be dating him. As Ben points out, Fired Up not only mocks the evil boyfriend by taking him to the nth degree, they also have the sweet girl state that she can’t believe she's dating the guy. Similarly, John Michael Higgins totally oversells the idea that no squad is allowed to attempt the Fountain of Troy because as soon as it’s mentioned we all already know that our squad will attempt it before the credits roll. Fired Up is full of these little moments and it’s comforting to know that the people behind the movie are in on the joke.

I can’t say I liked Shawn and Nick as people but I loved them as characters. I found their horndog douchiness much more affable, enjoyable and harmless than so much of the horndog douchiness on display in movies and television today. And it’s nice for the good guys in a movie like this to actually be able to command their screen time. They are usually meek and boring compared to the villain and side characters who get to ham it up.

The biggest drawback to Fired Up is that there are a lot of jokes that fall flat, possibly more than in any other movie I’ve enjoyed this much. But with the “let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks” mentality on display, those many failed jokes amount to a small percentage of the intended laughs.

The teen sex comedy is pretty much a cinematic wasteland. Fired Up doesn’t rise above its place in the genre, but it certainly rises above most of its brethren.

Preparing for the Fountain of Troy

Ben: I have not yet begun to talk shit about this movie.

When I called it a neutered American Pie, what I was referring to was that it wasn't a movie as much as a hollow shell of a movie. I understand completely that Fired Up is self aware, and in many ways that makes it worse for me. Because that means halfway intelligent people went ahead and made this movie, and perhaps felt slightly arrogant about what they were doing. If the director was so in on the joke, I have to believe something better could have come out of this. Was this money really spent just to say "teen sex comedies suck"? Is that why I sat through an hour and a half of pointless crap? Because I already knew that before it started. In retrospect, What Just Happened suffered from some of the same problems, it just had a way of overcoming them. I can't say the same about this picture.

Jeremiah and I will be settling this over a game of Joust.

Well, at least we all agree that Dr. Rick is awesome

Jeff: Unlike Ben, I don’t expect a lot out of my teen sex comedies. In fact, I only expect them to be funny. Funny, for me, has never been so much about the kind of gross out humor derived from Jason Biggs sticking his dick in a pie/vacuum/trumpet – I’m more of a one-liner guy, and Fired Up has plenty of those. I was kept laughing throughout the film and, if you weren’t, maybe modern comedies just aren’t your bag and you should go back to hysterically smirking at the works of Oscar Wilde.

I’ll admit to being a little thrown at first by the age of the leads. When the movie opens and they flee the musclehead fathers of a couple teenage girls they were macking on (molesting?), I was pretty sure the trouble here wasn’t overprotective dads but a couple of world class pedophiles. No, as it turns out, these dudes that are obviously pushing 30 are in high school. Luckily, there’s no attempt here to make Fired Up a genuine high school comedy (read: Superbad). In fact, there’s no attempt made to ground Fired Up in any semblance of reality. It’s just a bullshit high concept that manages to be very funny without too much pandering or gross out humor. To borrow a phrase from Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman (one of the three critics that gave Fired Up a positive review), it’s teensploitation at its finest.

Like Jeremiah mentioned, I really enjoyed the winking, post-modern elements of Fired Up - did I really just type that? - but I don’t think they always play in the film's favor. There was a concerted effort here to make the two leads as douchey as possible. The filmmakers are so outstandingly successful in that regard that I think they alienate a lot of viewers, especially critical ones (like Ben) who used to get beat up a lot in high school. The filmmakers also never fully commit to a genre deconstruction - the film’s final act lapses almost entirely into sincere teen movie treacle. Still – Fired Up manages to be consistently funny throughout and that is what's important here.

Finally, I think it’s interesting that the screenwriter of Fired Up chose to be credited anonymously (unless Freedom Jones is a real name, in which case I apologize). Was this teen comedy gem secretly written by some fancypants scribe of note? Or was Fired Up’s screenplay originally a much more vicious dissection of the teen comedy that, when the movie was finished, the writer chose to take his/her name off in protest? We may never know. Possibly the greatest, most beguiling mystery in cinema history, though. Right guys?

We're clearly divided on the merits of Fired Up. Is Fired Up a solid teen comedy full of laughs, or a complete waste of time? Do its winks at the suckiness of teen comedies add to the film, or just expose hypocrisy? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Next week: The Salton Sea