Ready to Rumble

It is spring time and here comes the first wave of action/macho movies, targeting horny teen-age boys and single, adult men with too much free time on their hands.

Take as example "Ready to Rumble", a fictional account of the reality called professional wrestling.

The plot of "Ready to Rumble" is thus:

David Arquette (Gordie Boggs) and Scott Caan (Sean Dawkins) are best friends (think: "Dumb and Dumber", and that definition of best friends, and you get an understanding of what that means here) who live in a backwater Wyoming town where they spend their days sucking the contents of Porta-Potties and their nights having their sense of good taste sucked away by cable television featuring Monday night fights--pro wrestling.

This, then that, and these two wrestling wannabes get tickets to the reigning champion's--Jimmy King (Oliver Platt)--latest title fight. But is King king of pro wrestling? No. It turns out, unknown to these two, that the king, the kingmaker, is a man named Titus Sinclair (Joe Pantoliano), a deliberate parody of Vincent McMahon, the man in the tux who intones "Let's get ready to. . . RUMBLE!", who has announced King will submit to another wrestling named Diamond Dallas, and lose his title and career.

Of course these two, who rarely deal in reality as others know it, don't understand how professional wrestling works, so they decide to find King once he is ruined and mastermind his comeback. To do this means engaging the services of the once-great Sal Bandini (Martin Landua) as King's comeback trainer.

King is not pleased with this effort, because he knows what is actually going on: I don't need a trainer, he roars. I need a safe house! Sinclair has forced him from the ring and he knows this. And he accepts this fact. His saviors don't, and mayhem ensues.

There is little of value and merit to "Ready to Rumble". It is obviously a remake of "Dumb and Dumber" as a wrestling send-up. Which goes to explain the creaky and weak dialogue between the main characters.

The humor of "Dumb and Dumber" was just that: Dumb. But funny. Here the same humor, the same dumb jokes are not funny because there is a reality not too far away.

And I wish desperately someone would bodyslam those responsible for this movie.

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