3218. Fired Up! (2009)

Starring: Nicholas D’Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer

Director: Will Gluck

Running Time: 90 mins

Fired Up! is an American film about two high school football players who decide to spend their summer at cheerleading camp to pick up girls, but they soon become more engrossed in the sport than they first expected.

Somehow released in 2009 and not 2001, Fired Up! is every bit the raunchy bro comedy you’d expect to see from the earlier part of the decade, complete with obnoxious characters, a pop soundtrack and a story that walks a tightrope between enjoyably silly and downright irritating.

Of course, if you were a fan of the likes of 40 Days And 40 Nights, American Pie and more, then you’ll certainly find a lot to like about Fired Up! I’ve never been the biggest fan of these raunchy teen comedies (with the exception of the hilarious EuroTrip), and unfortunately Fired Up! was far less of an exception to the rule.

Following two womanising football players as they integrate themselves in cheerleading camp – the movie is pretty much everything that you expect. Two guys finding any way possible to get with one of the thousands of girls at camp, and that’s about it.

There’s a story here too where Nicholas D’Agosto’s character inevitably becomes smitten with one girl, while Eric Christian Olsen continues to act like an adolescent dog on heat, but it’s nothing you’ve never seen before, and certainly not something I would have thought that Hollywood was still trying to peddle by the late 2000s.

Unless this is a direct tribute to the movies of 5 to 10 years before it (which I doubt), then there’s something really weird about Fired Up! for the time it was released. Disregarding its irritatingly juvenile lead characters, the film’s style feels exactly like what you’d expect to see from the garish sex comedies of the early ’00s.

Raunchy jokes and moronic behaviour are very much the order of the day here, while director Will Gluck styles the film with the same garishly bright visuals, pop soundtrack and plastic appearance of the teen comedies that came before it, only seeming to take their negative assets, and very few of their positives.

Like I said, if you’re a fan of this genre, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy Fired Up! There are a couple of laughs here and there, but for the most part the film tends towards irritating than genuinely funny, coming across like a movie from a bygone era – albeit an era only a few years before it. So, that’s why I’m giving Fired Up! a 6.2 overall.