REVIEW: The Foot Fist Way
REVIEW: The Foot Fist Way
By Lee Rice
Although occasionally funny, “The Foot Fist Way” makes a lot of mistakes, and usually bumbles along with at least one foot and one fist planted firmly in its mouth.
The film, a small independent feature, gained enough publicity for a wider theatrical release through the support of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, who are respectively starring in and writing the upcoming “Step-Brothers.” As the story goes, Ferrell and McKay saw the movie, and liked it so much that they wanted to share it with the rest of the world.
The real fun in “The Foot Fist Way” comes from the way that it mocks the modern practice of “McDojoism,“ the idea that most of the strip-mall karate places you see are actually nothing but black belt factories endlessly churning out a procession of under trained morons that think they can fight.
As a martial-arts fan and practitioner, this has been a long-time gripe of mine, and the movie addresses it brilliantly. "The Foot Fist Way," pokes fun at everything from the uselessness of board breaking, the ineffectiveness of pre-learned fighting combinations, the fact that a realistic degree of contact is strictly verboten, and the creepiness of instructors that hit on their students, and not in the way that the students are there for.
Even the idiocy of child black belts is expressed here, and it’s obvious that screenwriters Ben Best, Danny McBride, and Jody Hill had a lot of familiarity with the martial arts scene. The movie’s best moments are those where it laughs at the Tae Kwon Do (TKD) world, but it may seem like an inside joke to those who aren’t “in the know.”
As brilliant as those sequences are, they aren’t as frequent as they probably should be, and the movie seriously sags in some places. The main story follows a TKD instructor as he tries to cope with his wife’s infidelity, becoming increasingly unstable in his work life as he does so. Although these scenes can be pretty good at times, including one that shows that he isn’t afraid to attack a 10-year-old child, they sometimes feel like they were arbitrarily thrown in whenever the writer felt things getting slow.
Like “Napoleon Dynamite” before it, “The Foot Fist Way” has a dreamy, “drifting through life” quality that works for the former, but not the latter. The reason that it worked in “Dynamite” was because the movie was about teenage awkwardness, and how the daily grind turned everyone’s high-school life into a bland slurry of endless days, connected only by minor events that no one really cared about. “The Foot Fist Way” needs a firmer structure, and the occasional narrative kick in the seat of its pants.
On the plus side, the faux-documentary style they use compliments the tone of the film nicely, and there is a “Clerks”-esque attempt to relate the on-screen action to occasional title cards displaying the “Tenets of Tae Kwon Do.”
The film’s fatal flaw is its character department. Everyone in this movie, with the possible exception of the instructors two “apprentices,” comes off as an abrasive, unlikable jerk, and by the end of the movie it was my fondest wish that Chuck Norris would magically appear to beat everyone until they were inside-out.
The real problem with having a film without decent characters is that by the end, you WANT bad things to happen to them. Part of what keeps people interested in the story is that they care about the character and want things to come out for the best. Even films about serial killers, such as “Hannibal,” “Mr. Brooks,” and the excellent television series “Dexter” have characters so charismatic that the audience can’t help but hope that they’ll escape to kill again.
This one massive flaw taints the entire movie, sapping the viewer’s ability to care about anything that happens in the movie.
While “The Foot Fist Way” isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of imagination, I think the filmmakers could have used a little more training before entering the big leagues.
Final Verdict: 6/10
