“This is NOT a cheerleading movie.” Or at least that’s what Fired Up! claims.
Equal parts painfully vulgar and gleefully funny, Fired Up! is the latest entry into a recent surplus of cheerleading movies, but this one is not so much a cheerleading movie as it is an excuse to fling mindless and immature one liners in all directions.
This simplistic teenage melodrama features two foul-mouthed football jocks who scam their way onto their high school’s pathetic cheer squad, The Tigers, so that they can hitch a ride to cheerleading camp, where they hope to score some cheerleading honeys.
What ensues is a glop of cringe-worthy gags, double entendres and sexual misunderstandings, none of which are anything more than a rehash of overdone bits stolen from the American Pie movies. This film feels at least a decade too late. Its sole purpose is to see how much sexual innuendo can fill 90 minutes of screen time.
Even so, Nicolas D’Agosto (“Heroes”) is likable as Shawn, the somewhat more intelligent and sensitive of the duo, and Eric Christian Olsen (Not Another Teen Movie) as silver-tongued Nick keeps the cheap laughs fresh and loaded with bite.
But, considering how much they charge for movies these days, Fired Up! gives no credible reasons for why it’s worth an audience’s money. It’s a 90-minute slugfest between stereotypical potty jokes, and another typical portrayal of gay men as high pitched, prancing idiots.
To beef up its relatively unknown cast, model and actress Molly Sims (“Las Vegas”) makes an appearance as Diora, the wife of the camp leader. As he is apt to do, Nick makes several desperate and unfunny attempts to seduce this “femme fatale” he finds so intriguing. Stay for the credits to see if he scores.
Eventually, despite the boys’ aversion to relationships with just one girl, Shawn begins to develop a singular love interest for the leader of the cheer squad, Carly (Sarah Roemer of Disturbia), and, predictably, the film’s high jinks are supplanted by attempts at sensitivity.
Also predictable is when Shawn and Nick begin to improve the squad through heavy doses of confidence boosting megalomania. Soon enough, the testosterone super-charged duo begins to look and perform like cheerleaders themselves. Although, from the beginning, they never really look like football players.
The film wouldn’t be as bad if it, in any way, even half-way resembled the granddaddy of cheerleading movies, Bring It On. Unfortunately, the film’s director Will Gluck, throws the camera all over the place for the cheerleading scenes, a mess of quick and unrelated cuts that obscure the cheerleading movements.
It’s also worth mentioning that Shawn and Nick look like college seniors, not high school seniors, a reoccurring aspect of teenage comedies and dramas alike that, hopefully, will be outdated soon.
The film’s final face-off between The Tigers and cheerleading powerhouse The Panthers is anticlimactic and boring, lacking excitement even as it’s filled with Shawn and Nick’s witty but unnecessary blather.
Hopefully, D’Agosto and Olsen are paired again in a project with a little more substance, say a Judd Apatow film. Maybe next time they’ll get to play their own age. There’s only so long 30-year olds can play high schoolers.
