Fired Up [M]

Football stars Nick and Shawn have got picking up chicks down to a fine art, but then they realise that they’ve run through pretty much all the girls they can in their high school. When football camp is moved to the dry and devastating El Paso, the guys scheme to ditch it and spend the summer at cheerleader camp where there just so happens to be 300 girls. It’s smooth sailing until Shawn falls for his squad’s head cheerleader who’s suspicious of their motives. Now the two players much change their ways, maybe even grow up a bit, in order to prove that they belong there. 

At the end of the day this is a pretty pointless movie built upon a pretty pathetic and weak story however, the cast chemistry and the script and banter somehow managed to spark a bit of life into the lifeless Frankenstein’s monster that this movie could easily have been and turned it into a film that was interesting, funny, and strangely ok. 

Football stars Nick and Shawn have got picking up chicks down to a fine art, but then they realise that they’ve run through pretty much all the girls they can in their high school. When football camp is moved to the dry and devastating El Paso, the guys scheme to ditch it and spend the summer at cheerleader camp where there just so happens to be 300 girls. It’s smooth sailing until Shawn falls for his squad’s head cheerleader who’s suspicious of their motives. Now the two players much change their ways, maybe even grow up a bit, in order to prove that they belong there. 

I think what this here is, is an example of letting the story and writing evolve on its own. At its premise, I think it’s fair to say that the story is pretty feeble. I’d even go so far as to say that it kind of sucked. But by the time the credits began to roll I realised that I had been rewarded for my patience and perseverance. See, good things to those wait. The story’s simplicity and initial potential to be a strange diluted version of American Pie mixed with Bring It On paved the way for a predictable but still cute romance to blossom as well as a surprising and really nice journey of self-discovery and growing up between the two leads. The story that Nick and Shawn go on, though very badly and jaggedly thrown together to form some sort of shape, ended up being really cute and nice and kind of a pretty bromance. 

The script is actually rather good. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of it was improvised as there was such a natural and hilarious banter between the two leads that just made me laugh. I haven’t loved banter between two characters since Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes. That’s a pretty decent compliment by the way and the banter and the fantastic sense of timing that the two leads have is what I think makes this movie as endurable as it is. 

Starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer, Molly Sims, Danneel Ackles, David Walton, Adhir Kalyan, Juliette Goglia, Hayley Marie Norman, Jake Sandvig, and John Michael Higgins, Fired Up is a movie that starts off being pretty pointless and pathetic with a weak and half-arsed story, but then it matures and grows into something else that actually wasn’t that bad to watch. Filled with cheerleaders, bitch talk, romance, and comedy, it’s not a great movie, but it is a slightly pleasantly surprising one.