Review: 'Fired Up' for Mindless Entertainment

I enjoy silly comedies, and Fired Up fills the bill. It’s a standard variation on a plot done a million times before. In this case, two football jocks decide to attend cheerleader camp in order to apply their formidable sexual prowess to the extraordinary female-to-male ratio. The picture is entirely unrealistic in almost every way, from the preternatural romantic confidence of the male leads to the ease with which these two underage youths navigate the adult world.

And I don’t care. It’s goofy fun. The picture features a couple A-listers from the comedy world, John Michael Higgins and Edie McClurg, and anything either of them are in will almost always have something in it worth watching. The interplay between the jocks, Nicholas D’Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen, is better than it has to be (and the outtakes that run next to the credits reveal that a lot of the jokes were improvised). Juliette Goglia as the little sister made this picture when she was about 13 but plays with the timing and poise of someone twice her age.

Sometimes these “minor” comedies are brimming with little pleasures like these, and that’s reason enough to see them. Sometimes, though, they’re not–and still, I’ll go see ’em. It comes down to figuring out why you go to the movies in the first place. I have an ax to grind on the matter: A lot of people criticize pictures like Fired Up not because they have a problem with the picture per se but because they have a problem with movies as pure and occasionally mindless and even dumb entertainment. I don’t happen to have any problem with any of those things. I think people would be happier if they quit looking for something serious in every piece of entertainment and just allowed themselves to be amused once in a while. Not everything has to be art.

Then again, if people can’t relax enough to settle for simple amusement once in a while, it’s no skin off my back. I’m still gonna have a good time. Their inability to lighten up is, in the end, entirely their problem, and entirely not mine.