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Fired Up shouldn't be worth a damn, and, for the most part, it isn't. The film, after all, details the adventures of two smug, smartass high school jocks sneaking into a cheerleading camp in order to bed as many cheerleaders as they can. The leads, played by Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto, aren't characters so much as walking punchlines machines, and are really only distinguished by the fact that Olsen, who mugs a lot, is quite a bit more unsufferable than D'Agosto, who has a Beatles haircut and spends a lot of time looking soulful. As is the way of these movies, not only are the actors in them far too old to be high school students, but they act it. The movie wastes two terrific character actors, Philip Baker Hall and Edie McClurg; the latter, a longtime veteran of Hollywood's comedy community, could offer a graduate seminar in how to be funny. The script, by someone named Freedom Jones, feels as though it was assembled from an Ikea flat pack containing a hex key, a few pieces of hardboard and a sheet of instructions, written in Swedish, explaining how to make a teen comedy.

Given this, the film is better and funnier than it has any right to be. It helps that while the film's two main characters might be defined by their unsavory desire for teen pulchritude, the filmmakers themselves aren't. The film could simply have been an excuse to strip as many aspiring starlets of their garments as possible, but it isn't. Our heroes' conquests are mostly hinted at, but rarely shown, and the one sequence in which everybody bares it all is during a skinny dipping scene, in which most of the women demurely keep themselves underwater. In fact, it turns out the whole sequence is just an excuse to get Olsen and D'Agosto naked in order to humiliate them.

Additionally, the film may waste two of its older talents, but makes excellent use of John Michael Higgens. In the past few years, Hollywood has discovered that Higgens, who looks like a mild-mannered father from a 1950s television show, can be put into almost any movie and make it funnier, and so the makers of Fired Up give the actor as much time in this movie as they can justify, and then just get out of his way. Higgens plays the cheerleading camp's coach, and he brings to it a sort of lunatic manufactured enthusiasm, as though he had been a male cheerleader for so long that he no longer knows what should be cheered and what shouldn't. He prances around like a show pony, barking orders like a drill instructor and flying into girlish tantrums when minor rules are broken. He's so funny that the filmmakers get to the point where they seem to be straining to get him into as many scenes as possible, and sometimes they just put him in the background, watching cheerleaders rehearse their routines and mimicking them in the way that someone who has seen a movie many times will sometimes blurt out the dialogue. (The movie includes a scene of this, by the way: It shows the entire camp spread out on the ground, watching an outdoor move, and the movie is Bring It On, a 2000 film that Fired Up is mildly inspired by; as the movie plays, the entire cast recites every single line of the film in unison.)

Director Will Gluck, who is mostly a veteran of television comedies, brings a nicely daffy quality to the film. For one thing, he is obsessed with the physicality of cheerleading, and not in the way that, say, Debbie Does Dallas was. No, Gluck is curious about the way cheerleaders move, and so he has sort of constructed a world in which cheerleaders will behave like cheerleaders all the time. They do everything in unconscious unison, and, when not doing anything else, throw one leg over a friend's shoulder and start stretching. One group marches in military lockstep, and collectively make a panther-like growl, with accompanying clawing hand-gesture, when exiting the scene. Olsen and D'Agosto mimic this when they become male cheerleaders, but go too far with it: In several scenes, they just take off down the streets, tumbling like gymnasts, as though that's just how they get from place to place. Similarly, school mascots are always school mascots in this film: They never take off their costumes and never speak, even when lounging around in front of the television. This gives the film a weird visual panache. Even scenes that aren't very funny end up feeling somewhat hysterical.

As by-the-books as the plotting might be, screenwriter Freedom Jones hints that he's cleverer than you might guess. For one thing, he obviously recognized that he had created a story that might be insufferable. We might have very little sympathy for the to leads incessant womanizing, and so he does two things. First of all, he makes it clear that every girl at cheerleading camp knows why the boys are there, and don't mind, and are taking advantage of it too. (The film even includes a lesbian cheerleader who is obviously at camp for the same reason, and seems to be doing about as well.) Secondly, Freedom Jones makes one of the boys, D'Agosto, fall in love with a cheerleader, and spends most of the story following their halting romance. It isn't a great romance, but it does give the opportunity to introduce a character, played by David Walton, who is so obnoxious that he makes the film's protagonists seem positively gentlemanly. His character's name is Rick, but he insists everybody call him "Doctor" Rick, as he is a college freshman studying medicine, and "why put off the inevitable?" He is dating the cheerleader that D'Agosto has fallen for, and has been cheating on her, and is the ne plus ultra of douchebag boyfriends, down to the fact that he wears, and frequently polishes, a lime-green pair of Crocs. Next to him, the film's two male leads are suddenly recast as relatively harmless. Actually, as the film goes on, they become rather obsessed with cheerleading, having earnest discussions about moving from their core and whether they are favoring one side of their body too much, a transformation that culminates at a houseparty with their fellow football players. While the other jocks stagger around drunkenly and smash things, Olsen and D'Agosto quietly make Greek salad in the kitchen and discuss their feelings. Suddenly, they realize that this is not the sort of thing jocks do, and they're not jocks anymore; they've accidentally turned into cheerleaders. And here's a moment when it starts seeming like Freedom Jones might be a smarter writer than this film lets on. Because much earlier in the film, as a throwaway joke, D'Agosto had listed the ingredients of Greek salad. For those paying attention, the scene hints that they always were cheerleaders, and just didn't know it.