Is “Freddy Got Fingered” the worst movie ever made? I don’t know; I haven’t seen every movie ever made. But of the couple thousand or so I have seen, there’s no contest. This is the worst.
The film has a clear contempt for its audience. One can admire a certain disregard for political correctness, but here the idea seems to be to stretch the limits so far that even the sophomoric target audience cries, “Enough!”
Rather than manufacturing a plot, the film chooses instead to be an exercise in envelope-pushing featuring MTV’s latest monstrosity, Tom Green. On his TV show, Green runs around in public doing obnoxious and gross things, to the delighted squeals of his adolescent male audience. He does the same thing here, except now it’s for no reason. On MTV, he might interrupt work at a sandwich factory for the sake of garnering puzzled looks from employees and capturing on film the hilarity of real-life mayhem. But in a movie, he’s not Tom Green, and the employees in the factory are paid extras. Why would his character be doing this? Tom Green does it on MTV because he knows there are cameras rolling. But Gord Brody, the character he’s “playing,” doesn’t think there are cameras watching him. The only reason he would be acting this way would be if he were severely retarded.
What does Tom Green do in this movie? He causes an elephant to ejaculate all over his father. He causes his friend to shatter his leg, and then he licks the exposed bone. He whacks a paralyzed girl in the legs with a cane. He falsely accuses his father of molesting his brother, resulting in the brother being placed in an institution for molested children. He delivers a baby against the mother’s will, then — and this is where I very nearly walked out of the movie — swings the baby around by the umbilical cord.
Also in the movie is a running gag in which a young neighbor boy, about 10 years old, is constantly being bloodily injured, accompanied by his realistic screams of pain.
We’ve seen outrageousness and crassness be funny before. It is not funny here. There are no characters to identify with. There is no underlying sweetness. There is no subtle good-natured outlook. There is only caustic ugliness.
All of this is reason enough not to see it. But we’ll add a movie-critic reason: There’s no plot. Honest to goodness, there really isn’t one. Here’s what happens in the movie: Tom Green’s character, Gord Brody, leaves Portland for L.A., where he hopes to become an animator. After being rejected, he moves back in with his parents (Julie Hagerty and Rip Torn). He meets an oversexed paraplegic (Marisa Coughlan) who convinces him to pursue his dreams. He tries again, and gets a million dollars for his animation. He spends it all on getting back at his father, who kept nagging him to get a job and never believed in his art. The end.
Green co-wrote (with Derek Harvie, his “Tom Green Show” cohort) the film, and directed it, too. So all the blame goes to him.
Dull, insipid, horrific, uninspired, painful, ill-conceived, amateurish, embarrassing, foolish, moronic. These are the only printable words I can think of for “Freddy Got Fingered.”
No, wait, I thought of some more. Vapid, boring, stupefying, unoriginal, cynical, illogical, slow-moving, malodorous and putrid. Do not, under any circumstances, see this movie.
F (1 hr., 27 min.; )
