...there is no way of my getting around saying how badly amateurish the film is and how prosaic it can be.
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Here's another of those tiny films that fly beneath the radar for most of us. Paramount screened it at several film festivals in 2006, where it got a good reception, and then they opened it to limited release in 2008, where it died after earning about $100,000 at the box office, enough money to pay for a Hollywood star's lunch tab. Now, people at home can make up their own minds whether the film's eighty-two minutes of comedy justify a DVD purchase, rental, or miss.
For me, it's a miss.
Jody Hill makes his directorial debut with a script written by him and the movie's co-stars, Danny McBride and Ben Best. The whole business seems like lark for these guys, who appear to have made up the movie as they went along and shot it in their spare time.
The story concerns a clueless lump, Fred Simmons (McBride), an egotistical loser who runs a small Tae Kwon Do studio. I use the word "story" generously, though, because most of what passes for plot is more like a fifteen-minute skit stretched out five or six times longer than its action can sustain (or than this viewer could tolerate).
Fred's students are largely kids, with a smattering of older folks, all of whom he feels he must impress every minute with his martial-arts skills. He appears to take pleasure in hitting them and even kicking the crap out of them whenever the mood strikes him. In this regard he reminded me of Billy Bob Thorton's gym teacher in "Mr. Woodcock." Both characters are essentially bullies, picking on people smaller and less capable than they are. If your idea of fun is watching a grown man with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do showing off for impressionable youngsters and occasionally punching them out, "The Foot Fist Way" offers such sport aplenty.
Anyway, when Fred isn't hectoring his students, he's having problems with his wife Suzie (Mary Jane Bostic), a sexy, curvacious, and promiscuous blonde. She apparently has trouble holding onto a job because as the movie begins a friend has just helped her get a new position in the dental hygiene field. Fred unwittingly insults the friend and her husband at dinner one night, and then he insults his wife and her new job. Nevertheless, the one thing Suzie doesn't have trouble getting is men. She is no sooner working than she strikes up an affair with her new boss and leaves Fred.
A despondent Fred doesn't handle his wife's infidelity or her throwing him over with much composure, so he takes it out on his students. Note: This is a comedy.
While Suzie is away, Fred flirts with a cute girl in one of his classes and tries to pick up on her. She sees he's a blockhead and dismisses him out of hand, but Fred seriously thinks he's got something going with her. He's hopeless.
About halfway through the plot Fred meets his hero, Chuck "The Truck" Wallace (Ben Best), a movie-star martial artist and eight-year kickboxing champion. The guy turns out to be almost as big a jerk as Fred is, and the rest of the movie concerns Fred's dealings with Chuck, and Chuck's dealings with Fred's estranged wife.
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[release]24791[/release]