Seen on: February 20, 2009

The players: Director: Will Gluck, Writer: Freedom Jones, Cast: Nicholas D'Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer, Danneel Harris, David Walton

Facts of interest: None whatsoever.

The plot: Two popular high school friends skip footballl camp to join cheer camp and hook up with tons of girls...

Our thoughts: Will Gluck’s teen comedy “Fired Up!” is undoubtedly one of the most boring films I’ve seen so far this year. There’s absolutely nothing about this failure that amused me in any way, and by the time the end credits started to roll, I sincerely regretted wasting $7 and 94 minutes of my life.

The film tells the absurd story of Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen), two popular high school football players who decide to skip the summer at football camp and sign up for cheer camp instead. For them, it’s the only way to meet and fool around with girls they haven’t already hooked up with.

What happens next is pretty easy to imagine. While Nick sticks to the plan and uses his charm to seduce girl after girl, Shawn slowly starts to fall in love with Carly (Sarah Roemer), one of his teammates. Carly, however, has a moronic boyfriend, and winning her heart proves to be a tougher mission than Shawn originally thought.

As I already mentioned, I pretty much dreaded every minute of “Fired Up!” The film never really knows where it’s heading, and its dragging plot is just filled with brainless dialogue, embarrassing moments and a horde of disgusting gay jokes I cannot help but despise. It’s an offensive flick, and it’s utterly imbecilic to say the least.

In between the desperate attempts to be funny, “Fired Up!” also features a few cheerleading sequences, and while none of them really impressed me, I admit they are probably the film’s best moments. I mean, at least they’re not as stupid as the rest of it.

The members of the cast obviously had great fun shooting the movie, but they clearly forgot to act most of the time. Much like the characters you meet in the film, most performances here are empty, dull and quite simply amateurish. If I really had to pick one I disliked less than the others, I’d go with John Michael Higgins in the role of Coach Keith.

Freaky quote: “I think our bus crashed and we're in heaven." – Eric Christian Olsen

The final word: If you think this kind of simplistic comedy is hilarious, go ahead and have a blast, but if you still consider yourself a sane person, don’t bother spending your hard-earned cash on this atrocity. That’s it; I feel I’ve already wasted enough words on this.

Article by Franck Tabouring