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"Freddy Got Fingered" is perversely entertaining.
Warning: Scorching hot take incoming. This film reminds me of an early-2000s version of "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." Except, without any of the innocence. Okay, maybe a little of the innocence. After all, Tom Green himself describes "Freddy" as the “touching story of a young man who desperately wants to make his daddy proud."
Gord (Green's character) wants to be an animator, but his dad (Rip Torn) dismisses his talent and creativity as mere "doodles."
I didn't always laugh - man-child characters are not my comedic preference - but when I did, it was long and loud.
There are so many memorable lines and gags here, but the funniest scene - to me - doesn't involve sausages, cheese, or fingering. It's when Gord pretends to be an asshole stockbroker who fires one of his subordinates over the phone in a crowded restaurant to impress his girlfriend. He gets more and more animated, like one of the characters he draws, screaming at the top of his lungs. Of course, there's no job, no employee, and the phone isn't even on.
Roger Ebert famously wrote: "This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."
I mean, he's not wrong. But we still walked away with opposite opinions of "Freddy Got Fingered."
Look, a movie with "jokes" about cancer and child molestation isn't always going to work, but I get the impression that Tom Green was sometimes more interested in seeing what he could get away with in those scenes, even if that came at the expense of being funny.
Give Green credit: He commits to his character and this screenplay (which he co-wrote). So does Rip Torn. Anthony Michael Hall and Marisa Coughlan, too. But Torn is the unsung hero of this film. Without someone to match Green's intensity and insanity beat-for-beat, neither performance would succeed.
Unmitigated disaster or misunderstood masterpiece? Maybe "Freddy Got Fingered" is a bit of both. That's what makes it so memorable.