Tom Green is a sorry figure. He's the kid at highschool who tortured himself for the amusement of others purely so they wouldn't beat up on him. I don't make this statement with the kind of authority that can be backed up with paperwork; it's just the obvious truth. Freddy Got Fingered is the irrefutible evidence behind my allegation, a movie so stupidly conceived that it dispells any myth of Green as genuinely insane and highlights him for the fundamentally sad tosser pretending to be "like, totally crazy, man" that he truly is.

In this instance Green plays Gordy Brody, a 28 year-old loser living with his parents who spends his days skateboarding through shopping malls and dreaming of becoming a professional animator. Between such acrobatic feats and bouts of mildly disturbing gibbering about superhero cats with x-ray vision, Gordy promises his equally lunatic father Jim (Rip Torn) that he's going to make him proud by hopping into a parentally funded convertible and heading out to Hollywood to realise his doodling dreams. Naturally, the reality is that he splits his time between working in a cheese sandwich factory and hassling a local animation guru at his favourite restauraunt with increasingly confounding pitches for TV shows.

Amongst this and other arbitrary nonsense (and boy do I mean ar-bi-tra-ry), Gordy finds himself entwined with a crippled nymphomaniac nurse called Betty (Marisa Coughlan) who is obsessed with building a rocket-powered wheelchair (?!?), and manages to have his 25 year-old brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas) committed to a home for sexually abused youngsters after convincing a therapist that his father is a child molester. Throw into the mix all the usual Green mannerisms of cheese fetishism, animal abuse and over-repetition of random, annoying catchphrases and what you end up with is a less than childish blend of crudely distilled immaturity attempting to pass itself off as "comedy".

Not that there's anything wrong with gross-out comedy (the Farrely brothers have been getting away with it legitimately for years), but green chooses to indulge in childish asides too often and too randomly. While the likes of, say, Dumb And Dumber could argue it's set pieces as vaguely plot motivating, here our writer/director/star/fuck-knuckle indulges his own sick visions purely because some idiot has handed Green enough money to allow him to show it on a 40-foot screen. When Gordy stops his car en route to Hollywood in order to jump out and masturbate a horse (yup, you read it right), it's not for any reason other than his having been amazed by the enormity of it's genitalia as he was passing by. This is not comedy; it's animal abuse.

Similarly the movie's handling of Gordy's relationship with Betty proves horribly disturbing. Potraying a handicapped person as enjoying moments of sexual deviancy is no less legitimate than if the character in question were able-bodied. That Green expects us to laugh as he canes Betty's paralysed legs with bamboo purely because she is a) in a wheelchair and b) "a little bit goofy" is not challenging our intellect or our perception of what is morally acceptible, it is simply demonstrating how utterly out of touch our host is with common decency. Clearly Green thinks he is allowing us some glimpse of his true anarchic genius. What he's actually achieving is the highlighting of just how little genius he truly possesses.

With Green's self-indulgence quickly nipping the few moments of comic potential to be found swiftly in the bud, it's left to the likes of Rip Torn and Julie Hagerty as Gordy's parents to salvage the few mild laughs that remain in a movie otherwise bereft of the scantest entertainment value. For all Green's moaning about his fall from what little grace he could claim, Freddy Got Fingered is truly the calling card of a man begging to be ignored. If you want the proof of his status as a one-trick pony, this is most definitely it. It's just sad to see a grown man refuse to accept his fifteen minutes are gone and deprecate himself and others in the cinematic equivalent of Custer's Last Stand. Avoid.

Disko has awarded this movie 1 out of 5 "marks"