A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

There’s been a lot of buzz for at least a year now on The Foot Fist Way, a very low budget indie comedy about Fred Simmons, a supposed Tae Kwon Do expert and “master of the demo” who pretty clearly isn’t all he cracks himself up to be.  It’s been bouncing around and seeking theatrical distribution since premiering in 2006 at the Los Angeles Film Festival and screening at Sundance later that year, and word has generally ranged from positive to ecstatic.  So needless to say, I rushed right out to catch a Friday showing as soon as it finally hit my local theater, and, well… all I can say is I shoulda seen that coming.

Don’t get me wrong — parts of the movie are quite funny.  It’s not at all a complete failure.  But Fred Simmons is just so unlikeable, so utterly devoid of any detectable redeeming characteristics whatsoever, that by the time some even worse characters come along and show what a true punkass amateur bitch he is at being a dickhead (which could’ve created some rooting interest in Fred just by making him look better by contrast) it was too late.  I hated this guy.  He’s stupid and mean, he’s a braggart and a blowhard, he treats kids poorly, and you could even argue that he’s a con man, since he makes his living convincing people to pay him for instruction he doesn’t seem even remotely capable of giving.

That’s why The Foot Fist Way will always be a cult film with a tiny following.  If the writers had given Simmons some trace of decency and imbued his character with a detectable hint of inner conflict between the better and worse angels of his nature, then more people would have found a way into the story, a way to invest their emotions in the struggles and obstacles facing him, particularly if one of those struggles was to be a genuinely better man.  As it stands, though, the movie works only if you look down on the main character — way, way down — and that’s not the sort of comedy I’m especially comfortable with, and it’s not the sort that most audience members will pay for, either, so it’s no surprise that the film took so long to find theatrical distribution and never went wider than a couple dozen theaters or so when it did.