There are bad movies, there are horrible movies, and there are movies whose very existence is inexcusable. And then there’s “Freddy Got Fingered,” a “movie” offering proof that chewing your own leg off would be preferable to sitting through 90 minutes of Tom Green making an ass out of himself – as an actor, as a writer, and as a director. Not to mention making an ass out of anyone who sits through this horrific mess, thinking there has to be a point.
Green seems right at home as Gord, a 28-year-old moron living in his parents’ basement and dreaming of a career as an animator. To follow that dream, he heads to Hollywood and contacts an animation executive (Anthony Michael Hall) by lying to the company’s receptionist (Drew Barrymore) and then has the audacity to ask Barrymore’s character out. Hall’s character looks at Gord’s drawings and tells Gord they make no sense.
Crushed by this unexpected rejection, Gord moves back home, to the dismay of his parents, especially his dad, Jim (Rip Torn). Jim’s something of a dysfunctional guy who regularly insults Gord and has a bit of a temper. Gord’s mom, Julie (Julie Hagerty, of “Airplane” fame), just wants her son to be happy. Things change for Gord when he meets Betty (Marisa Coughlin), a wheelchair-bound woman who changes his outlook on life with her dream to make a rocket-powered wheelchair and her belief in him.
Why someone like Rip Torn, an actor with more than 50 years of experience, allowed himself to get wrapped up in this useless piece of cellulite boggles the mind – especially with what he’s asked to do. That includes his character dropping his pants and asking Gord to act on something he yells at his dad. Funny? No. Sick? You bet. Much like how Betty gets turned on when Gord whips her legs with a bamboo stick. Or what he does to a newborn baby after he delivers it. Or what he does with a deer carcass. Sure, the line between funny and insulting can be a thin one, but Green goes way over the line from the beginning and gets to the point where he can’t even see the line anymore. And there’s still 60 minutes left in the movie.
The, uh, story (cowritten by Green and Derek Harvie) is so bare-bones that Green is allowed plenty of time to do the random, stupid things that made him a star on MTV. That may be well and good on a half-hour show, but it gets old – really old – when stretched out over an hour and a half.
What surprised me is that it took about 45 minutes for the first people to walk out of the theater. For some reason, I stayed until near the end, in the hope that I’d be able to find something, anything, of value – and there it was, right before I left. In a crowd welcoming Gord and his father back from Pakistan after they are captured by terrorists (it makes about as much sense as the rest of the movie), someone holds up a sign that says, “When the f—k is this movie going to end?” If only they’d held it up at the beginning.