FIRED UP!
US, 2009, 90 minutes, Colour.
Nicholas D' Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer, Molly Sims, John Michael Higgins, Philip Baker Hall.
Directed by Will Gluck.
Fired up! Is a take it or leave it comedy - many will prefer to leave it! It is a comedy about high school students with sexual preoccupations, more in the talking than in the action.
Nicholas D’ Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen are top football players who do spend some time in practice but also in surveying all the female students and trying to make out with them – which they often do.
Philip Baker Hall has a guest role as a swearing football coach and John Michael Higgins is a bizarre manager of the camp for cheerleader training. Molly Sims is his wife.
This film runs the general American formula of having the men do a whole lot of ogling, rather chauvinist sex talk, but getting to a situation where they have to grow up and establish some more adult relationships.
The device that is used is that the two young men are attracted to some of the cheerleading girls and decide to skip the football camp and go cheerleading. Nicholas D’ Agosto is the more earnest young man and is attracted to the chief cheerleader – but she has a boyfriend, a medical student, friend of her family who is all talk but really does not like her at all. Gradually, this is exposed and true romance can ultimately bloom. In the meantime, Eric Christian Olsen flirts with everyone, but secretly writes poetry and has a crush on the camp manager’s wife. There is also a gay young man who is attracted to him as well as a very camp camp-managing-assistant.
As with so many other similar films, and the group watches Kirsten Dunst in Bringing It On and mouthe all the lines, there is a cheerleading competition with a particularly obnoxious group who win every year. The deception of the boys is found out but they are allowed back, the team performs well in the competition but does not win, but they are pleased with what they have done and all seems to be well.
The film is particularly cheerful, some of it fairly inane in its characters and situations, but, ultimately, as similar American films do, it comes down on the side of some kind of moral sense and purpose.
