THE FOOT FIST WAY
Starring Danny McBride, Mary Jane Bostic. Written by Jody Hill, Ben Best, Danny McBride. Directed by Jody Hill. (14A) 85 min.
Two years after its Sundance premiere, The Foot Fist Way has made it to Toronto, though you’d be forgiven for not noticing. Despite an abundance of online hype (including a 10-best-list mention on Ain’t It Cool News) and the evangelizing of No. 1 fans Will Ferrell and Adam McKay — who share a “presented by” credit after using their considerable schlep to get the film a distributor — Jody Hill’s comedy, about a belligerent small-town tae kwon do instructor (Team Apatow satellite Danny McBride) struggling with a crisis of confidence, opened on Friday in a single theatre without a press screening, nor, to my not-quite-eagle eyes, any newspaper ads.
The last buzzed-about American comedy to be treated so unceremoniously by its distributor in these parts was Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. To put it kindly, The Foot Fist Way is no Idiocracy. Judge’s film, a live-action episode of Futurama lamenting the dumbing-down of North American society, tempered its obvious aesthetic shortcomings with caustic, liberating wit: the ugliness of The Foot Fist Way, meanwhile, is literal and figurative. This latest example of the comedy of dead air, in which inappropriate remarks are followed by uncomfortable silences, presents us with a genuinely hateful lead character — McBride’s stupid, stunted dojo martinet Fred Simmons — and then surrounds him with even less sympathetic foils, like his adultery-addicted wife (Mary Jane Bostic, in one of the more unflattering female roles in recent memory) and a faded, boozing action-movie star (Ben Best) who reluctantly comes into his orbit and inevitably kicks his ass.
Supporters claim that Hill, McBride and Best have done something revolutionary by refusing to sugarcoat their protagonist’s shortcomings, but their harsh conception of Simmons as a petty, ignorant egoist isn’t balanced by any empathy or insight into his personality. They’re just scoring easy points off of their toy simpleton, and if McBride’s dead-eyed line readings occasionally provoke giggles, the overall effect of so much cruelty is grueling. The mean-spiritedness might be easier to forgive if the film were funny — as the similarly condescending Napoleon Dynamite frequently was. But the amateurishness of the craft (the final showdown between McBride and Best is almost avant-garde in its incoherence) precludes any sort of sustained comic tone. On the whole, Redbelt was funnier — though not on purpose.