Fired Up! (2009)

Fired Up! arrives from 2009 with the confidence of a film that has never once been asked to justify itself. Two high school football players, Shawn and Nick, lie their way into a cheerleading camp in pursuit of three hundred young women, and the movie regards this scheme with the benign approval of a guidance counselor who has given up. Will Gluck directs his own screenplay, credited to a pseudonym, and the pseudonym tells us everything about the amount of introspection involved.

The film's cultural inventory is remarkably sparse. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Adhir Kalyan appearing in support and the screenplay making no comment on the fact. There is no engagement with race, no environmental conscience, no critique of wealth, no interest in bodies that deviate from the cheerleading ideal. The female characters exist to be pursued, and the camera regards them with the enthusiasm of a catalog. What the film does contain, in abundance, is the specific hormonal logic of a fourteen-year-old boy who has recently discovered that girls are real, and it commits to that logic without apology or shame.

This is not a film with a message, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is a ninety-minute escalation of a single joke, performed by actors in their late twenties and thirties wearing letterman jackets, and it flopped accordingly. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where a character turns to the audience and explains what we should all be learning. In an era when even the cheerleading comedy might feel obliged to editorialize, Fired Up! simply refuses. That refusal is not virtue. It is not art. It is simply a comedy that knows what it is, which is more than most of its contemporaries could manage.