The first 30 minutes of “The Foot Fist Way” are as intolerable as anything released in the last ten years. The rest of this mercifully short movie is slightly more tolerable, yet remarkably unfunny for a comedy. Tae Kwan Do instructor Fred Simmons (Danny McBride) is the most socially retarded, immature bag of douche you will ever run across. His miserable whore of a wife (Mary Jane Bostic) eventually becomes fed up with his petty mind games and leaves him, and the only way Fred can set things right with the blow to his ego is to meet up with his hero, Tae Kwan Do master and B-movie action star Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (Ben Best), who turns out to be a drunken, lecherous jackass. The biggest laughs involve a student with anger issues knocking a senior citizen student unconscious, and Fred pounding the eight-year-old son of a man Fred suspects was having an affair with his wife. The movie clearly thinks Fred’s obliviousness to everything around him is funny – take, for example, his belief that he had a fling with a student that never actually happened – but it’s really just sad. It’s one thing to make your lead character an anti-hero, but Fred isn’t an anti-hero; he’s a loser, and there is no bigger waste of time for us than watching a loser act like a loser. That Will Ferrell and Adam McKay thought this movie was funny isn’t just puzzling; it’s disturbing.
