Backflipping to a theatre near you

Ready? Okay. Two horny jocks ditch football practice to go to cheerleader camp and fish in a sea of chicks. Has this been done before or does it just feel that way? I confess to an unwillingness to do the research necessary to answer this question, and in any case Fired Up! is hardly concerned with innovation, save perhaps the ushering of male characters to the forefront of what might be deemed the cheerleader comedy sub-subgenre, one that’s now officially gone meta: the movie features a scene where all 300-plus of the participants in hot pants attend an open-air screening of the proto-pom-pom-com Bring It On and chant along with every line of dialogue.

The first scenes of Fired Up! raise provocative questions. Why do these high school seniors look old enough for doctorates? Who is this mysterious screenwriter with the suspicious moniker of “Freedom Jones”? Shouldn’t Philip Baker Hall get a new agent? Could they, ie: “Freedom Jones,” not think of a better running gag for Baker Hall’s Coach Byrnes than having him say “shit” a lot? And, with all due respect to the great PBH, isn’t 77 a little old for a football coach? More pertinently, is it just me showing my age, or do each of the stars of Fired Up! not seem eerily modeled after older famous actors? There’s the new Ralph Macchio, the junior Kate Hudson, and this strange, troubling hybrid of Owen Wilson and Jim Carrey. Where do they breed these kids? What do they feed them?

Such questions do not distract for long however, because Fired Up! is actually fairly diverting. Seriously. Director Will Gluck displays no special finesse with the camera—unless you’re deeply impressed by spiraling crane shots that allow us to take in a maximum number of teenage tits in tight tops without cutting—but between Mr./Ms. “Jones” and the admirably game leads the dialogue often zips quite nicely. An affection for screwball comedy can be felt in these rapid-fire gags and goofball non-sequiturs. Especially in the second act, things move along very fast, and I laughed. Not one bit of the plotting felt even slightly inspired, but the repartee helped the robotic story breeze along. So perhaps it’s safest to call Fired Up! an above average teen sex comedy, which still makes it a fundementally mediocre movie, but of a sort that you can’t really feel too depressed over. I have to defer to Manohla Dargis, who pretty nailed it in her New York Times review: “kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb.”