READY TO RUMBLE
A film review by Chris Casino
My film scale:
**** - Excellent *** - Good ** - Fair * - Poor No stars - Terrible, don't even bother.
NO STARS out of ****
Cast: David Arquette (Gordie Boggs), Oliver Platt (Jimmy King), Scott Caan (Sean Dawkins), Bill Goldberg (himself), Joe Palitaliano (Titus Sinclair), Rose McGowan (Sasha), Diamond Dallas Page (himself) Steve Borden (Sting), Martin Landau (Sal) and several other WCW guys.
Crew: Directed by Brian Robbins, written by Steven Brill, Executive produced by Eric Bischoff.
Let me just start this review off by saying I am a huge fan of professional wrestling and have been for fifteen years. I am not too fond of Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, however, and I am even less fond of it now after seeing this ridiculous excuse for a wrestling movie tonight.
The plot concerns two losers named Gordie Boggs (David Arquette, aptly cast as a neandrathal) and Sean Dawkins (Scott Caan) who are so obsessed with professional wrestling that they believe everything they see on WCW Monday Nitro is something more than a flashy show. When they finally get to see their hero, WCW World Champion Jimmy King (played by Oliver Platt. I personally would have gotten a wrestler to play King), he ends up getting screwed over by evil promoter Titus Sinclair (A wasted Palitaliano, in a role originally meant for real-life WCW President Eric Bischoff before he was fired and rehired six months later, and if anyone reads this who knows Bischoff, they will agree with me that the role of Sinclair had his name written all over it), they embark on a quest to find him and help him get his title back. When they find him, they discover in horror that Jimmy King's real life is nothing like it is on WCW TV. King is a drunken Atlanta native rather than an English king. After convincing King that they don't care that his persona isn't real, Gordie and Sean sneak him back onto WCW Monday Nitro, after which Sinclair agrees to book him in a main event steel cage match for the WCW title and his job back in Las Vegas at WCW's pay-per-view.
Gee, whiz, there are so many things wrong with this movie, I don't know where to begin. Yes, I do...
1. The characters of Gordie and Sean show you what Eric Bischoff, WCW President who thought up this project, thinks of wrestling fans. He thinks of us as idiots who take everything wrestlers do seriously. He actually thinks wrestling fans are dumb enough to believe this is meant to be taken seriously. I got news for you, Eric: NOBODY above the age of four is dumb enough for that, this is 2000, you know, not 1985! I know he'll probably cover arguments up by saying it isn't meant to be taken seriously but it is, because that's how big an ego Bischoff has. 2. There was a documentary made in 1998, Wrestling with Shadows, that documented the owner of the World Wrestling Federation, Vince McMahon's screwing Bret "The Hitman" Hart out of the title. This movie's storyline is basically a comic rip-off of that plot with the poor man's Wayne and Garth thrown in. Eric Bischoff is trying to make Vince McMahon look bad with the character of Titus Sinclair, but any wrestling fan knows Titus is more like Bischoff than McMahon, and that Vince did what he had to do to Bret Hart. 3. The movie's main wrestler, Jimmy King, has an English king gimmick and the audience cheered big for him. No wrestling fan actually enjoys characters like that in this day and age, we want bad asses today! 4. Why make this a comedy, instead of an emotional, ROCKY-style drama? I know wrestling isn't a sport, but you can still get behind a guy who struggles as a wrestler and finally makes it in the end. 5. In the movie, Gordie starts up an ill-fated romance with Nitro Girl Sasha (the lovely Rose McGowan. What she sees in that freak Marilyn Manson I'll never understand), only to find that she has hospitalized King's trainer for Sinclair. Wouldn't it have been easier to just have them fall in love instead of doing the typical spy-girl-for-the-bad-guy cliche? I hate that. 6. Last, but certainly not least, there was not one single moment in this movie that I could not predict would happen, nor did I laugh once either.
The World Wrestling Federation should have been the wrestling company to make the movie, for these reasons:
1. They're the better promotion. 2. They have better and younger talent, performers and wrestlers. 3. They give their fans what they want and don't treat them like idiots. 4. They're winning the ratings and they're the promotion everybody cares about. 5. Simply put, they could make a movie a hundred times better, and they could do a wrestling movie the right way.
The only good thing about this movie was they played outtakes at the end. And if I spoiled it for you, good, I saved you from wasting seven dollars.
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