A Small Fire

I recently borrowed a few DVDs from a friend, just to have a "secondary stash" to work through here and there while waiting on new Netflix deliveries or whatever. It was something like five movies I've been interested in seeing for a while. Except that I ended up leaving the friend's house with closer to 10 DVDs, because she kept handing me things... "oh, you should see this" ... "well, this has some good stuff in it" ... and so forth. I don't want to say that borrowing the movies I wanted was contingent on also taking the movies I didn't specifically want, but it kinda-sorta-almost felt like that.

So that's how I came to have last year's teen comedy Fired Up! on my list. (As for why I chose to watch that sooner, rather than some of the other more desired movies in the pile? Well, I had a short window one day, and it's only 90 minutes long.) The poster practically says everything you need to know about the plot of this movie; basically, two horny high school football jocks join the cheerleading squad so they can go to cheerleading camp and have more opportunities to score chicks.

Actually, the movie is surprisingly, amazingly, not completely dumb. But it achieves this unlikely feat only on the strength of its two stars, Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen. The two of them make a crazy-good on screen pairing. It's a sort of a Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in Dude Where's My Car sort of thing... or a Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Zoolander sort of thing. It simply should not be funny. And yet, you can't help but laugh sometimes, because they are really funny.

That said, Fired Up doesn't ever come close to the level of lunatic hilarity of those other movies I mentioned. Dude Where's My Car gets assists in the supporting cast from people like Hal Sparks and Jennifer Garner. Zoolander gets them from Christine Taylor and Milla Jovovich (and yes, even Will Ferrell, who doesn't resort to his typical "naked humor"). Here, the two stars are doing all the work. (John Michael Higgins is in it, but given nothing funny to do.)

So, while the movie surprisingly doesn't suck, it's also hard to recommend it. Mostly, it makes me wish that someone would cast this comic duo you've probably never heard of to be in some other movie that's actually better written. You could waste 90 minutes in worse ways than Fired Up!, but I'd still only rate it a C+.