Fired Up

Review By: Tom Herrmann
TomHerrmann@TheCinemaSource.com

Growing up with an older sister and having dated several girls, I've been forced to sit through a good number of chick flicks in my time. When I watch a trailer for a film, I can usually tell when they are trying to spin the story to make it seem more guy-oriented. When I saw the Fired Up trailer I realized that not only are they doing a bad job of covering up a chick flick, but they had the nerve to name the movie website ThisIsNotACheerleadingMovie.com… LIES!

We start off the movie with Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) and Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) laying some truly heinous moves on a couple of girls as if they’ve had a year of practice. Well, once things start to look up for the boys, the girls’ fathers show up (yes, both of them), and Nick and Shawn use their athletic skills to escape a deadly situation in a scene that couldn’t have seemed more staged.

The next day at school, we see Nick and Shawn in their natural habitat: hitting on chicks the most insensitive ways possible and playing some football. The two of them are supposed to be heading to a football camp over the summer, but because they’re such great ladies’ men that they have gone through all the girls they could consider in their school, they conclude that it is somehow more masculine to go to cheerleading camp to get some new action. Honestly, these characters at no point gave me that feeling that they were suave enough to get in the pants of almost every girl at a school with 3000 people, and, if they were, I doubt “going to cheer camp” would make its way onto their to do list.

The guys seek the help of Shawn’s sister Poppy (Juliette Goglia), who is one of the most awkward characters in a film made up almost entirely of awkward characters. Poppy is in middle-school and seems to be a premature business woman, always carrying a blue-tooth in her ear. She somehow manages to get the guys into the camp, and they are off. SPOILER ALERT! They don’t know what they have gotten themselves into.

Fired Up or, as I like to call it, Wedding Crashers 2: It’s Kind of an Underdog Story This Time, proves itself to be a film with one redeeming quality: pretty girls in tiny outfits. This factor, of course, drowns in a sea of terrible characters, generic dialog, and an overall feeling that everything is very forced.

As I implied earlier, the film is a pretty big rip off of Wedding Crashers. Nick’s character is just like Vince Vaughn’s because he’s the swift talking stud who just wants to have a good time during most of the film’s shenanigans and Shawn’s character is just like Owen Wilson’s; even though he starts off with similar intensions to Nick’s, they quickly change for the better when he falls for a girl who seems worth ...