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| Released: |
2001 |
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| Genre: |
CONTROVERSIAL
WORST
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
88 |
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MIXED Reviews
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| Most of the time, Tom Green's material is reminiscent of an attention-starved child smacking himself with a pan and screeching out “LOOK AT MEEE!!!” behind clenched teeth. But for some of that time, his material turns up a nugget of truly hilarious humor. I'm not quite sure what to think of Freddy Got Fingered. It does have a point to sell, that people whose creative visions differ with those of the common public are often met with jeers, but the way Green tells us this is more annoying and infantile than it is grossly funny and amusing. |
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| (Adam J. Hakari) |
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| Freddy Got Fingered is heinous, tiresome, does things with large mammals that are just plain wrong and includes some of the funniest scenes in memory... Green is such a maniacal comic, he often can't see the line between funny and stupid. At a slight 93 minutes, the film could lose 20 of them, mostly from the succession of gags that clog the movie's middle. Surprisingly, Green turns out to have a keen, but twisted, way with relationships. As things get worse and worse between father and son - and Green and his girlfriend - the movie actually improves. Of course, it's all very weird, but there are some families who prefer to bond not over a beer and a football game but over a spent elephant somewhere in Pakistan. |
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| (John Zebrowski, Seattle Times) |
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| Tom Green clearly set out to make an extraordinarily offensive non-mainstream film - a “punk comedy,” if you will - and, just as clearly, he succeeded. Regardless of how I feel personally about it, I'm not going to make the mistake of elevating my own reaction to the level of Platonic truth. Many, many reviewers have fallen into this trap, using their own negative response to suggest that the studio shouldn't even have let this movie be released, and then delivering a finger-wagging lecture to the fans, saying, how dare you find this funny... Without question, Tom Green is fully aware of what he intended with the film, and in my opinion accomplished his goal. There's a small and very telling self-referential nod towards the beginning, in the scene where Gord is showing his material to the animation executive. “It sucks,” says the executive: there are no characters, there are no events, there's no logic or coherence, and “it makes no sense.” Clearly, Green is acknowledging that his material stands outside the rules of conventional criticism... Beyond this evident self-awareness, it's also possible to see a specific satirical agenda behind the film, in terms of taking what in a conventional comedy would be harmless slapstick and insisting on following through to realistic injury. We laugh at people falling down all the time in movies, and Green seems to be asking us, is it still funny when they get up bleeding? However, again, recognizing Green's modus operandi and (to me) his clear attainment of his goal does not necessarily mean that one is wrong if one fails to enjoy the movie. I will repeat, and stress strongly, that what Green is doing will appeal to only a small fraction of the moviegoing public. Most people, in fact, will hate this movie, and will find it an endurance test of the worst kind. I didn't hate it, because my interest was piqued by the parallels with its dadaist predecessors - but at the same time, Lord, I did not enjoy it. |
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| (Movie Geek Central) |
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| A somewhat disjointed affair that, like the man himself, is occasionally brilliant, frequently repetitive and sometimes merely annoying. |
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| (Luke Y. Thompson, New Times Los Angeles) |
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, Rip Torn 