You’d think that, if Will Ferrell were involved in a movie, especially one that purports to be a comedy, it would wind up being, you know, funny.  But apparently Ferrell’s comedy chops have been badly dulled by being chased by dinosaurs and dressing up like elves, because if this is Ferrell’s standard, he wouldn’t recognize a comedy if it crawled up his pant leg and started licking him.

Today we’re tackling The Foot Fist Way, a comedy in name only that will thoroughly fail on many levels.

When a small-town tae kwon do instructor, a lunatic obsessive control-freak by the name of Mr. Simmons, gets wind of his wife’s infidelities, he snaps completely.  Forced to confront his own inner nature, he sets out on a pilgrimage to meet his personal hero, martial arts legend Chuck “The Truck” Wallace.  But when he discovers that the Truck has more problems than he does, will it break the snapped man completely, or will it help the man heal by showing him worse than he is?

As a comedy, The Foot Fist Way  falls tremendously flat.  In all honesty, I didn’t laugh for the first half hour.  I could spot several jokes, but not one of them managed to hit.  Simmons is way too big of a jerk to be that entertaining, especially early on as he doesn’t get much of a comeuppance for his unseemly behavior.  When he does, it seems too much like karma biting him hard in the ass to be anything funny.  It’s more satisfying than funny, but it’s a bitter sort of satisfaction.  Frankly, I want to beat the hell out of this guy myself.  By the time the movie was half over I found myself desperately longing to douse his little porn-star mustache in kerosene and light it up.

That having been said,  I did manage to get some laughs out of the second half, but even then, these were uncomfortable laughs coming from a guy who was so thoroughly unsettling that the only thing left to do was to laugh.

It tried, really it did, but the end result was just so flat, the jokes so frequently unsuccessful that it generated few laughs.  Half of those laughs were sad ones, besides.  The point of this, at the end of it all, just escapes me.  I spent this movie bored out of my skull, and how anyone could be interested in this is quite thoroughly beyond me.

You know there’s no way I’m going to recommend this slag heap to anyone.  It’s dull, it’s shoddy, the production values are like something out of the very worst direct to video sludge pile.  The dialogue is overblown and vastly overdone.  It makes entirely too much out of itself, and falls apart in virtually every point.

The Foot Fist Way is a sad little wreck of a film.  It fails on virtually every front–a comedy that can’t elicit laughs is meaningless–and may well be the single dullest thing I’ve seen in weeks.  The Screenhead Ten Scale is going to punish this lump of solid misery by giving it a full one out of ten.

At least it showed up.  It didn’t do much else, though.