IT’S not often you find jokes – some of them fairly funny – about Spencer Tracy, Alvin Ailey and Nathan Lane (not to mention the first mention of President Obama in a studio feature) shoehorned into a teen sex comedy like “Fired Up!”
The script for this schizophrenic oddity about a pair of unlikely high school football stars who go to cheerleading camp to score with the chicks – credited to the apparently nonexistent Freedom Jones – appears to have been devised by a committee of writers of widely varying ages and sensibilities.
If this movie were a teenager, you’d put it on Ritalin right away.
Directed with blowtorch subtlety by veteran TV producer Will Gluck in his big-screen debut, “Fired Up!” is an occasionally amusing, sometimes horrifying misogynistic, homophobic and half-heartedly satiric mash-up of “American Pie,” “Porky’s” and “Bring It On,” among many others.
In the movie’s funniest scene, the girls at cheerleading camp recite dialogue out loud at a screening of the latter film.
Less intentional laughs derive from strenuous efforts to suggest R-rated smuttiness within the box-office-friendly confines of a PG-13 rating.
There’s a lot less on-screen action than there is talk about it, more male nudity than female, and some of the biggest laughs derive from the filmmakers’ extreme inventiveness in sexual euphemisms.
A sample: “You can winky tinky on my face, just don’t tell me it’s raining.”
Although all of the actors make rather elderly teens, coming off best here is Nicholas D’Agosto as Shawn, the more sincere of our horn-dog heroes.
Sarah Roemer, who resembles a younger Cate Blanchett, is also not bad as Carly, the squad leader Shawn falls for in spite of her suspicions about the guys’ motives – and despite a jerk of a college boyfriend who calls himself “Dr. Rick” (the appalling unfunny David Walton).
Shawn’s way-stupider bud is played by the tow-headed Eric Christian Olsen, whose crassness conceals a secret poetic spirit that wins him the heart of a 30-year-old hottie (Molly Sims, whose character he charmingly describes as “ancient and desperate”) married to the camp’s not-so-closeted leader.
The latter is played by John Michael Higgins, a regular in Christopher Guest’s movies, who fares far better than the distinguished Philip Baker Hall (of Paul Thomas Anderson’s rep comedy), desperately miscast as the football coach.
“Fired Up!” is the kind of movie that can sincerely quote John Lennon one minute, then have a character proclaim that “we can take a dump in our pants and do better than last year.”
Make that a double dose of Ritalin.
FIRED UP! Bring it off. Running time: 89 minutes. Rated PG-13 (crude sexual humor, partial nudity, profanity). At the E-Walk, the Orpheum, the West 34th Street, others.