CollegeHumor Movie Review: The Foot Fist Way

Note: Don’t be fooled by the title, this is not, I repeat NOT a porno. On a side note, my apologies to everyone in the theater)

If there’s one thing I’ve known since childhood, especially during my extreme Ninja Turtles phase, it’s that physical humor is almost always funny (unless your little brother tells on you of course. Wuss). So a movie about a full-of-himself Tae Kwon Do instructor who has his own dojo at the local mall? Sure, sign me up.

Remember that video that came out a while back with a drunken Will Ferrell arguing with his 2 year old Landlord? That was the first video made by Adam McKay (the guy who wrote Anchorman) and Will Ferrell‘s production company, ‘Gary Sanchez Productions’. The Foot Fist Way came on the scene at the LA film festival where Will Ferrell saw it, decided he liked it, and did what any normal person would do: throw down tons of his own money to get distribution rights to the whole thing under his new production company. LA seems fun.

Anyway, since this is a small time movie going big, its kind of an acquired taste – it’s a little like Napoleon Dynamite, except with scenes that are actually funny.

The movie stars Danny McBride as Fred Simmons, a local mall Tae Kwon Do instructor who never did anything after graduating from High School. He’s kind of an idiot in the way that Michael Scott from The Office is, and for that reason he’s pretty damn funny in that awkward sort of way.

After finding out his wife has been giving handjobs during her company’s office party, Fred kinda loses it a little. That is, if you consider beating up on students, crying excessively, and telling a kid that his parents would slit his throat just to get ahead “losing it” (I mean come on, the man’s only human). Trying to pull his life back together, Fred meets up with his personal hero – Hollywood Tae Kwon Do master, Chuck ‘The Truck’ Wallace, who is kind of a drunken d-bag and ends up making more problems for our guy. There’s a lot of sex jokes, uncomfortable moments and people getting knocked out. Awesome.

The bottom line: If you like subtle kinds of comedies, this one’s not bad. It’s definitely not as funny as some other wide release movies out there, but seeing a heavyset woman getting drilled in the face, and the hands down best ever end-of-movie breakup dialogue is good enough for me.