DVD: The Foot Fist Way

This movie was made by a bunch of dudes from North Carolina a few years ago for roughly fourteen pesos. It sat largely unwatched and unreleased until Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, who have made it their mission to become arbiters of the comedic for all of America via the internet and film, got a hold of it and secured a limited release this year. Not many more people saw it in theaters, but the I'm sure the recent DVD release will see a solid cult following develop around this movie. Not only does it have the endorsement of comedy samurai like Ferrell, McKay, Judd Apatow and Patton Oswalt (who is a quasi-evangelist for the movie), but it's got the sort of perfectly quotable dialogue that can be dropped without notice into any conversation. I personally can't wait until the next time I'm sitting in a restaurant before the meal arrives to say "I'm so hungry I could eat a grown man's ass." However, the theatrical release did see a bit of pushback develope among critics who found the film mean-sprited towards its characters in a way that poisons the humor.

The story of Tae Kwan Do instructor Fred Simmons, played by co-writer Danny McBride, who is coming off of a monster year in which he was the funniest thing about the two biggest comedies of the summer, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder, and his struggle to come to grips with his wife's freely dispensed handjobs, has some of the DIY vibe of Napoleon Dynamite, mixed with the existential bleakness of Your Friends and Neighbors. The film is loosely assembled, episodic and largely plotless. More importantly, there is very little in the way of character development. Fred Simmons is a preening dick at the start of the film, and slightly concussed preening dick at the end. In the context of the movie, these aren't really demerits; if the filmmakers had tried to affix a redeeming character arc to their collection of brutal, awkward-comedy vignettes, it would look like a cheap concession to audience expectations. As it stands, the defiantly unsympathetic characters and stunted emotional growth give the proceedings a sense of tactile reality. You don't get the sense of smart-ass filmmakers mocking a bunch of karate-chopping crackers. Rather, it feels like a rancid, sad but bitterly hilarious slice of life culled from experience. The last shot of the movie is a freeze frame of Fred Simmons looking defiantly, yet stupidly into the middle distance. The look on his face brings to mind a line from American Psycho: "this confession has meant nothing." Coming on the heels of ninety minutes of failure and obvliousness and deadly killing systems, the moment is a dark comment on the American psyche. Plus, there seriously high-level comedy in this movie, most of it of the squirm-inducing variety. Not to mention all of those delicious dialogue nuggets that you can hold onto for use at the perfect moment...like during a gang-rape situation.

Score: 8.7