Release Date: May 30
Director: Jody Hill
Writer: Ben Best, Jody Hill, Danny R. McBride
Cinematographer: Brian Mandle
Starring: Danny R. McBride, Ben Best, Mary Jane Bostic
Studio/Run Time: Paramount Classics, 85 mins.
Good-natured and exceedingly goofy, The Foot Fist Way is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect Will Ferrell to star in if it weren’t for its microscopic budget. It skewers a sport that Ferrell has yet to drop his dim-witted persona into the middle of, and he may have thought the same thing when he and his production partner Adam McKay saw the completed film and decided to get behind it. Thanks to their involvement, it’s on its way to a theater near you.
Danny R. McBride (All the Real Girls) plays Fred Simmons, the pudgy, self-important head of a suburban Tae Kwon Do school. Shoeless in a white gi, with his thumbs hooked into his black belt, he paces before the kids and adults in his class and makes one inappropriately violent or suggestive statement after another. The film’s co-writers appear in two smaller parts, Jody Hill as Mike McAlister, Fred’s Tae Kwon Do peer, and Ben Best as Chuck “The Truck” Wallace, an actor and martial arts expert who the guys idolize and eventually get to meet.
The swift 85 minutes come to a close after a Tae Kwon Do tournament, naturally enough. Several dangling threads—the self-esteem issues faced by a couple of Fred’s students and the trouble he’s having with his wife, an improbable bombshell named Suzie—are so lightly explored that tying up each one takes the same minute or two that it took to develop. In some cases the guys don’t bother. They introduce Mike with great fanfare and then all but drop his character, and the several awkward references to sexual predators might be offensive if they seemed like they’d been considered for a few minutes by the screenwriters. But everything feels like it sprang from an all-night, cola-fueled brainstorm, so every bit slips easily away, usually after generating a grin or two, if not many laughs.
Obtaining theatrical distribution is as hard as ever, but humorous websites like Ferrell’s own FunnyOrDie.com are a popular fallback for DIYers like Best, Hill and McBride. Except for its length, The Foot Fist Way might have felt more at home on the little screen, but these guys now have their foot (and fist) in the door; their next film, currently called Your Highness will be directed by the increasingly unpredictable David Gordon Green, who knows McBride from film school.
Good for them. And yet, I don’t think we’re meeting a new band of comic geniuses. Some critics have expressed surprise that The Foot Fist Way turns a little sweet in the end, but humanizing a doofus is almost always the comic screenwriter’s Holy Grail. Ricky Gervais of The Office is clearly a model, and it’s no surprise that people emulate him. The surprise would be if they managed to do it as well. McBride and gang haven’t, but film studios regularly spend far more money than this to produce 85 dumb minutes. If nothing else, these guys can do it on the cheap.