Jocks trade pigskin for plain skin in cheerleading sex comedy
"Fired Up" is the kind of frivolous, self-censoring PG-13 summer teen sex comedy that I, as a member of the film critics establishment, am supposed to loathe because it has no edge and sees the world as one big sexual Disney World for impossibly glib and cocky high school boys.
But I didn't loathe it. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing it again, because for every horribly clever pop culture reference I caught and took time to write down, I must have missed three.
Imagine if someone put a gun to the heads of the writers on the TV series "The Gilmore Girls" and forced them to pound out a conventional teen sex fantasy about two jocks who go off to summer cheerleading camp to score with the girls.
"Fired Up" would probably be the result - a standard-issue plot with stock characters who fire off wisecracks, insults and pop-culture references with the speed of an M-16 on full automatic discharge.
With a script that operates like Diablo Cody on crack (but attributed to Freedom Jones), "Fired Up" gives us Shawn and Nick (Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen), two popular football stars at Gerald Ford High School somewhere in Illinois. (The production actually never left California.)
Having participated in sports only because it attracts girls - they admit it in the dialogue - Shawn and Nick bail on the football squad with their foul-mouthed coach (Philip Baker Hall) and join the cheerleaders at Southeastern Illinois University for cheer camp.
The head cheerleader, Carly (a cute and salubrious Sarah Roemer), instantly knows what the boys are up to, yet their insincere charms and crass come-ons seem unstoppable. Nick, a cross between Kevin Bacon and Jim Carrey, trains his sights on the very hot but "old" Diora (Molly Sims), the athletic wife of supercharged camp leader Coach Keith (John Michael Higgins), a study in motivational unawareness.
Shawn, against his better judgment, falls hard for Carly, who not only dismisses him, she's already engaged to a college freshman (a comically challenged David Walton), a egomaniacal pre-med student who insists everyone call him "Dr. Rick." "Why postpone the inevitable?" he asks.
Carly wants to win the big cheer-off, but the perennial winners, the black-clad Panthers (led by the slinky Annalynne McCord) appear to be unbeatable. This time, Carly has two new not-so-secret weapons: Shawn and Nick.
While Dr. Rick supplies a never-ending string of variations of Carly's name ("Carlita's way!" he calls her, and "Carls Barkley!"), Shawn's precocious kid sister Poppy (Juliette Goglia on full-throttle scene-steal mode) plots the guys' strategy and utters such quips as "Don't go all ABC After School Special on me!"
"Fired Up" comes from first-time feature director Will Gluck, whose TV background explains the film's bland visual style. But Gluck does understand comic timing, and he floors the editing accelerator so that if his movie doesn't look attractive, at least it's fast.
Gluck nicely handles a piece of physical comedy in which a naked Nick and Shawn, armed only with pompons, engage in a forced cheer routine that manages to keep their naughty bits covered with split-second precision.
Unlike many teen sex comedies, this one comes with two guys who reluctantly grow out of their shallow selves into whole, complete people. If you miss this arc, don't worry. Nick keeps us posted with running commentary.
"I think I'm becoming a whole person!" he marvels.
Now that I think about it, maybe the writers of "Gilmore Girls" would have passed on this.
"Fired Up"
Two stars
Starring: Eric Christian Olsen, Nicholas D'Agosto, Sarah Roemer, Molly Sims, John Michael Higgins
Directed by: Will Gluck
Other: A Screen Gems release. Rated PG-13 (language, partial nudity, sexual situations) 90 minutes