The 2000 Stinker Ready to Rumble is the WCW's Sadly Successful Bid to Make a Movie As Stupid and Shitty as Those of WWE
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In a Mandela Effect type of situation, I vaguely remember the 2000 comedy Ready to Rumble having historic, if not creative or comic value, as a comic snapshot of what the WWE looked and felt like at the turn of the millennium.
I was wrong but also, confusingly, right in many respects. Ready to Rumble is not technically or officially a WWE movie. Yet it is nevertheless populated with wrestlers and announcers who belonged to what was known as the World Wrestling Federation before the film was made and/or would hook up with the World Wrestling Federation after Ready to Rumble was released.
That’s because Ready To Rumble is the first, last and only film to be made about Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (or WCW), which was once a fierce competitor to Vince McMahon’s powerhouse wrestling league but was sold to McMahon not long after Ready to Rumble bombed.
Ready to Rumble inspired one of the stupidest moves in the history of professional wrestling. WCW was so overjoyed to be in business with David Arquette, the runty, moderately popular star of films such as Never Been Kissed and Scream 3 that they decide to make him its World Heavyweight Champion.
It was a storyline uniquely unpopular among wrestling fans and wrestlers as well as Arquette himself. As a wrestling buff Arquette understandably felt that having a goofy, slight amateur win the championship to promote a poorly received slapstick comedy made a mockery of the title and the league.
Yet he went along with it all the same in a wildly misguided bit of corporate synergy gone awry that managed to simultaneously harm Arquette, the WCW and professional wrestling as a whole.
Making Arquette Champion of the WCW would be like having Carrot Top dominate the WWE but that would be more organic because that dude is fucking shredded, an absolute unit.
I would much rather watch a documentary about Aquette’s weird love-hate relationship with wrestling than suffer through Ready to Rumble again. That’s fortuitous, because a documentary on that subject exists in 2020’s You Cannot Kill David Aquette, which chronicles the actor’s return to the ring nearly twenty years after the events of Ready to Rumble.
You Cannot Kill David Arquette’s title alone made me laugh more than Ready to Rumble in its entirety but that’s setting the bar awfully low as this is one of those stinkers that literally did not make me laugh a single time.
WCW Champion Arquette and Scott Caan star as wrestling-obsessed losers with literally shitty jobs cleaning outhouses whose lives revolve around their favorite wrestler Jimmy King, a Jerry Lawler-like country-fried brawler played by Oliver Platt.
When Jimmy King is humiliated professionally at the hands of Machiavellian boss Titus Sinclair (Joe Pantoliano) the wrestling-loving dullards decide to embark on a quest to find the disgraced wrestler and save his career.
They discover, to their shock and horror, that wrestling is fake and that King’s persona in particular is a vicious lie. He’s actually a classist, misanthropic caricature of a boozed-up hillbilly who has abandoned his family and is hated by his mother and father.
The doofuses recruit legendary wrestling coach Sal Bandini (Martin Landau) to get King off the sauce and back in fighting form. From the way he’s treated in the film, you’d think that Landau was an outrageous physical comedian rather than an Academy Award-winning dramatic actor.
Don Rickles would have been a better choice for the role. The same is true of Rip Torn, who has the benefit of being a talented comic actor who committed to these kinds of lowbrow roles in movies like Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Freddy Got Fingered in a way that was both impressive and a little alarming.
Alas, not even consummate pros like Landau and Platt can glean even a single meek laugh out of this dire material. That’s also true of the many WCW wrestlers who show up for cameos.
I have been hearing a lot about the concept of “quiet quitting”, a passive-aggressive gesture where an employee conveys their intense lack of emotional investment in a job by only doing the bare minimum.
Actors and actresses have been quiet quitting for ages only it’s called “phoning it in” or “sleepwalking.”
That’s Rose McGowan in Ready To Rumble. She has the profound misfortune to play what passes as the film’s female lead in Sasha, a member of the WCW’s scantily-clad Nitro Girls dance group.
When Sasha sees Gordie and Sean ogling her and the other Nitro Girls as they change she’s improbably flattered and even more inexplicably turned on.
Gordie doesn’t just seem naive or immature: he appears to be a mentally challenged man-child with a mental age still in the single digits. For extra awkwardness he’s a proto-incel and adult virgin whose sex life seems to consist exclusively of masturbating feverishly to the poster of Sasha hanging in his room.
For reasons that eventually become clear, this professional sex bomb desperately wants to jump Gordie’s bones and relieve him of his cursed virginity despite the dim-witted doofus seemingly having only a vague sense of what sex even entails.
When Sasha leeringly tells Gordie she wants to see him show off his moves he obliviously shows off his grappling skills. When she tells Gordie she’d like to wrestle with him in the bed and removes her bra while saying, “I will now unveil my secret weapons” his response is to yell “Foreign objects!” and begin physically assaulting her.
I was mortified at the idea of the film’s ostensible hero smacking a woman but Ready to Rumble suggests that she’s really into it and sees it as sexy foreplay rather than domestic violence.
Gordie is a virgin no longer but when he very conveniently overhears Sasha talking on the phone to Titus Sinclair and he discovers that her boss had her seduce Gordie so she could get information on him and Jimmy King. So he coldly rejects literally the only woman in the world willing to have sex with him.
McGowan could not be less invested in her role or the film. She’s dead on the inside, doing the bare minimum and not an iota more.
It could be worse. Early in the proceedings, Sean tells Gordie that he’s flattered that a local girl is clearly into him but because he considers her “one of the guys” having sex with her would consequently make him gay.
In the third act Sean comes to realize that being with a woman who likes traditionally male pastimes like wrestling does not actually make someone gay but even a dope like him shouldn’t have thought that in the first place.
Ready to Rumble’s myriad flaws include an unconscionable hour and forty-seven minute runtime. There’s no reason an ugly, ignorant trifle like this has to last longer than eighty-five minutes but then this has a LOT of corporate synergy to get through.
This is not officially a WWE movie but one thing it does have in common with the films put out by the dominant wrestling league is that it’s incredibly stupid and also fucking sucks.
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