Blu-Ray Review: Audiences Won’t Cheer For Lame ‘Fired Up’

CHICAGO – How desperate are you for laughs? If you rent all the straight-to-video comedies that come down the line, then “Fired Up” may have enough lines that hit the funny bone to warrant a rental. It’s certainly not as unbearable as some theatrical junk like “Disaster Movie” or “White Chicks,” but that’s doesn’t mean it’s worth your time.

Blu-Ray Rating: 2.0/5.0

Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D’Agosto star as a pair of horny football players at Gerald Ford High School who decide to ditch football camp so they can spend some time hitting on the chicks at cheerleading camp. It’s so simple a plot that it’s kind of remarkable someone didn’t come up with it earlier.

Fired Up was released on Blu-Ray on June 9th, 2009.
Photo credit: Sony

Of course, one of the guys falls for the cute girl who heads the squad (Sarah Roemer) and the other falls for the wife (Molly Sims) of the over-the-top instructor (John Michael Higgins). Will the guys learn a lesson about teamwork and find love surrounded by cheerleaders? Of course they will.

Fired Up was released on Blu-Ray on June 9th, 2009. Photo credit: Sony

No one who looks at that cover of “Fired Up” (doesn’t it look like something that should have starred Scott Baio and Willie Aames in the mid-’80s?) is going to rent of buy the film with much expectation, but will they be satisfied? Let’s use the quote from Mark S. Allen on the cover to dissect the film - “Funny, Sexy, and Smart - A Triple Threat.”

Do you find homophobic, misogynistic jokes funny? Humor is as subjective as anything, but “Fired Up” made me laugh only a handful of times. Higgins finds a few laughs and a scene where the cheerleaders-in-training speak the dialogue along with “Bring It On” is pretty clever. But that’s about it for “Funny’.

“Sexy”? You have to have a really low threshold for cheerleaders in spandex to qualify. The unrated version does feature a little more skin, but “Fired Up” is about as sexy as a beer commercial.

And “Smart”?!?! Really? Was it smart to cast two actors closer to 30 than to their high school years? (Even the female lead, Sarah Roemer, would have to be on the 9-year-plan to still be in high school.) And whatever you want to say about the dirty jokes of “Fired Up,” there’s not a single twist or turn that even the makers of the film would call “Smart”.

The unrated version of “Fired Up” includes about a minute more material, usually just a line or two that needed to be cut to get a PG-13 but there is one topless scene and some extended footage of Adhir Kalyan’s naked ass when the gang goes skinny dipping.

Special features on “Fired Up” include a commentary with director Will Gluck and the film’s two leads, “This Is Not a Cheerleading Movie: The Making of Fired Up,” “Double Duty,” an unrated version of the gag reel, and “Fired Up Press Junket - Hour 12 Footage”.

[16]	By BRIAN TALLERICO [17] Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com [16]