Ready To Rumble is, without question, the worst movie in human history.
Released in 2000, it stars David Arquette and Scott Caan as two wrestling fans who set out on an adventure of sorts after their favorite wrestler was screwed out of the title and they’re gonna get him back on top. The favorite wrestler in question is a character named Jimmy King, played by Oliver Platt. The title that Jimmy was screwed out of was the WCW World title.
Once upon a time, there was a wrestling company called World Championship Wrestling. And for a couple years, they were the hottest thing in the wrestling world until the WWF got its shit together and kicked their asses. Somewhere along the way, WCW decided that they needed a movie to boost their popularity even further and THIS was the end result. To make matters worse, this was released during a time when WCW was producing some of the worst wrestling programming ever conceived and, in case some of you are wondering if this movie did anything to help WCW’s image, the movie failed to make bank at the box office, it was critically panned, and a year later, WCW would be shut down and its assets purchased by WWF.
The sad thing is that at its core, Ready To Rumble’s plot isn’t all that bad. Top wrestler in a company is screwed and exiled from the top and with the help of his two biggest fans, he eventually regains the confidence and his prestige, while being a bit more humble along the way. In the hands of competent filmmakers, this could have been the basis for a nice, feelgood comedy of sorts. Alas, in the case of Ready To Rumble, we don’t have competent filmmakers at the helm… but that’s okay. The one thing that this had in common with WCW was the lack of competent acumen present in producing a quality product.
Ready To Rumble fails on multiple levels. It fails as a comedy movie; it’s all low-brow, scat-based humor. Some of the slapstick bits are somewhat embarrassing. They somehow got a big time actor like Martin Landau to play an old-time wrestler and made him look like a loon. None of the actors in this movie come across as particularly good and a lot of that is less due to their performances (which aren’t great, but they tried to make the most of this garbage) and more due to the pisspoor writing. None of the jokes are funny. None of the action bits are particularly good. And then we get to the main bits of the movie, which is the wrestling bits.
And that brings up another point; Ready To Rumble fails as a wrestling movie. I understand that wrestling is largely seen as low brow entertainment, but considering that this featured WCW wrestlers and talent and Time Warner still owned WCW, you’d think that they would try to make a movie that depicted wrestling in a semi-respectable manner… or at the very least, didn’t make WCW look like the biggest shithole in the world. Wasn’t the point of this thing to try and get people interested in WCW? How did that work out?
Oh wait, it didn’t.
The fact of the matter is that Ready To Rumble treats wrestling like a joke. It depicts wrestling fans as being a bunch of retards who have no life whatsoever. It is a movie about wrestling that is so embarrassed to be a movie about wrestling that it doesn’t try to disguise that fact and does whatever it does to make wrestling seem like a joke. And hey, I understand that there are those who share that mindset. Wrestling is seen as low-brow entertainment and given the kind of shit that WWE puts on television these days, it’s hard to argue that point.
Here’s the thing, though; once upon a time, WWE did put out a movie; a little thing you may have heard of called No Holds Barred. And yes, it’s largely a live-action cartoon – it’s a Hulk Hogan movie, for fuck’s sake. Of course, it’s a cartoon… BUT when it comes to the wrestling aspect of it, at no point is it treated as a joke. Hogan plays the World Champion and a rival network wants Hogan to jump ship, so they start their own show, find their own tough guy, and sends challenges to Hogan to fight their guy Zeus. And the climax is a wrestling match where lots of stuff happen that probably shouldn’t, but within the context of the movie and the story that they’re telling, it works.
Now I’m not going to tell you that No Holds Barred is a GOOD movie – again, it’s a Hulk Hogan starring vehicle – but it does a far better job of treating the wrestling bits as straight as possible within the context of the story they’re telling. Ready To Rumble, on the other hand? Wrestling is a joke, everyone involved in the business is a joke, everyone who enjoys this stuff is a joke, and this whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling waste of time. Now does this film offend me as a wrestling fan? No, but it does offend me as a moviegoer. If you’re making a movie about this thing and you’re not going to take it seriously, why should I? The wrestling aspect is buried in shit and everything around that central piece of business – the “funny” bits – fails even harder.
The fact that WCW had a hand in this movie’s production and would allow their brand and wrestlers to be treated like total goofs while hoping that this would raise awareness in their own product… dude, who’s gonna watch this and think “This WCW looks stupid, but I WANT MORE?!” Ironically, the depiction of WCW in the movie isn’t that far removed from the product that was being presented on WCW television at the time of release.
But even beyond that, Ready To Rumble is just trash all around. You have talented actors who have done good stuff elsewhere reduced to scat jokes and juvenile humor that even the juveniles would consider too juvenile. I’ve seen David Arquette do good stuff elsewhere (Scream, that movie with the dog, whatever those Collect commercials were), Oliver Platt’s been in some good stuff, and again… they somehow dragged MARTIN LANDAU into this piece of shit. These are talented actors who have done good work and they are WASTED in this piece of shit.
I’m no fan of Hulk Hogan. At no point will I ever watch a Hulk Hogan movie and call it a good film. A good Hulk Hogan movie simply does not exist in this world. Even so, I would rather watch every single Hulk Hogan movie under the sun ten times over than suffering through another sitting of Ready To Rumble, which I have no problems in declaring the absolute worst movie ever made in human history. And I don’t need to have seen every movie ever made in human history to make that determination because I REFUSE TO BELIEVE that there is a movie out there that is worse than this.
This movie is trash and deserves to die.
dtm666 