MOVIE REVIEW: FIRED UP!

FIRED UP!

Five of Seven Cows

Pathetically adolescent, mindlessly juvenile, sinfully shallow and unabashedly boneheaded: This could be a perfect description of Fired Up!, a teenage sex-comedy starring twenty-something actors pretending to be high-school cheerleaders. It could also, I’m ashamed to say, be a perfect description of me for liking it. What can I say; I’m an idiot man-child. Shoot me.

                 

Fired Up! , starring Nicholas D’Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen,  is the touching tale of two star high-school athletes who decide to help their school’s embattled cheerleaders in a contest they’ve placed last in four years running. Ahh, the altruism; that’s what I found so enjoyable. Some might see this as a shameless ploy for the boys to run amok among a hoard of hotties, but I found it to be a heart-warming act of sacrifice and selflessness.

                 

Who am I kidding? Not even myself. Fired Up! is the latest in a genre known disturbingly as “teenage sex-comedy” and can trace its lineage at least back to Porky’s, a movie I consider responsible for most of my debauched twenties. No good can come of movies like this. That didn’t keep me from horse-laughing all the way through it, mind you; a fact I’m not proud of.

                

 D’Agosto and Olsen have the too-clever, too-cool teenage-buddy thing down, despite the fact that they both seem old enough to star in a graduate-school farce. Set that aside, though, and they are funny, as is the script. Both main actors have the charisma to pull off their roles, and the supporting cast is well-chosen as well.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen this type of movie – I do play an adult in real life – so maybe that’s why it seemed fresh to me. Is it wholesome? No. Is it novel? No. But who cares? It’s funny stuff.

                 

Of course, the question remains whether the target audience for this film, teenagers, should be allowed anywhere near a movie about two guys in search of more fertile sexual fields to till. That’s for parents to decide, I guess, though I will say that despite the subject matter it’s not nearly as graphic as much of what’s aimed at this age-group. The recent Friday the 13^th, for example, was practically soft porn, whereas in Fired Up! there’s no actual nudity. Of course that’s more a function of the PG-13 rating than any sense of decorum on the part of the filmmakers. As always; parents beware.

                

 So, am I proud of liking Fired Up!? No, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I give it five smirking, mildly-embarrassed cows.