Review of Freddy Got Fingered (2001) by Graham P — 08 May 2011

Smarter than people tend to realise this one. Tom Green basically persuaded a studio to give him a $15 million budget and made a car crash of a comedy, though not one without several laugh out loud scenes for those with a suitably surreal or purile sense of humour. Critics panned the hell out of this film when it was released back in 2001, and I believe I can see why: it pays no heed whatsoever to standard Hollywood convention, featuring a more or less irrelevant plot and a deranged performance by Green in the lead role. It's really more of a series of bizarre and often quite tasteless sketches than an actual movie per se.

Here's the thing though: We are living in an age where, increasingly, film comedies are feeble and limp affairs where the actual jokes come thin on the ground and often these are little more than cheap attempts to gross out the audience in some way or invoke a feeling of mild embarressment. Take the likes of Forgetting Sarah Marshall or the woeful American Pie series. These movies are basically reworkings of the old "anarchic" and "raunchy" teen and young person sex comedies like National Lampoons Animal House and Porkies. Then you have the even more pitiable likes of modern Airplane-like spoof attempts such as the Scary Movies, Epic Movies, Date Movies et al.

The other films I have mentioned all tend to be hamstrung by filmmakers requirements to conform to certain genre expectations. Essentially, they are all a bit like other films that have gone before them and have basically retread the same old jokes over and again. As well as this, films like American Pie and Get Him to the Greek have been written by people who feel the need to make the characters somehow likeable or sympathetic in a way to somewhat soften the gross out stuff a bit, or as an attempt to inject some pathos in to proceedings. It's a pointless exercise of course, when people are only watching these films to see some idiot screwing a pie or drinking semen or having urine poured over their head. The movies are essentially farces with pretentions of being something intelligent, or thought provoking.

Freddy Got Fingered aims to do nothing other than make the audience laugh. To my (admittedly highly subjective) sense of humour it is often funny too, for all that it is also childishly offensive. It's no masterpiece; in my opinion it misses the mark at least as many times as it hits, but in it's own way it is pushing boundaries and trying to do something rather differant. I think that's the key here. This is not a formulaic comedy.