THERE! I FIXED THE MOVIE! - Fred: The Movie
Fred: The Movie is a 2010 comedy film by Clay Weiner (yes, that’s his real name) based on the popular internet icon as created by Lucas Cruikshank. It is also the worst movie I’ve seen in my life. It’s fascinating to see a movie that failed spectacularly in every last conceivable way, from the acting, the comedy, the directing, the editing, everything about the movie completely fell apart. Does that mean the film’s without saving? Well…no. My motto here at “There! I Fixed the Movie!” is that no film is without fixing. So, with that in mind, how would I fix Fred: The Movie?Let’s start at the beginning. Throughout the movie, we see our intrepid...hero? Fred has a massive crush on this girl Judy, and by that I mean he goes full blown stalker mode, constantly saying stuff like “oh she’s my girlfriend, she just doesn’t know it yet” or “she just likes to pretend she doesn’t know who I am”. But what if we tweaked that a little? Fred could still be madly in love with her, but they could tone down the stalker-ness of it all, so Fred would come across as more a hopeless romantic in the veins of Ted Mosby. But it doesn’t just end there, why not tweak it a little on Judy’s end? Remember that scene in the film that shows Judy telling Kevin to stop pelting Fred with dodgeballs? What if we see Fred get really touched by Judy’s sentiment, working up the courage to thank her in person? That would be a more believable motivation for Fred’s adventure rather than just “oh he just wants to sing with her, he’s totally not a stalker guys”. Then when we get to the end destination and winds up at a party, Fred could take the time to thank Judy for what she did and potentially reveal his feelings towards her. But we could see clearly that Judy’s embarrassed by his presence. This leads to Fred humiliating himself after Kevin shoves a pizza onto his shirt and him vomiting all over Judy, right? Maybe not. What if when Fred tries to thank her, he gets way too nervous and pukes on her on account of his awkwardness? As the scene is now, it just looks like he barfs because “haha funny”. At this point, the film would play out as it usually does, Fred throws a fake party and impresses everyone, but for the conclusion, I have two solutions to this: one is Judy apologises to Fred for embarrassing him and they patch things up like in the final film, but this time she does so before he films the fake party, then allowing him to realise that he’s being stupid and calls the whole thing off. The other is, and hear me out on this, what if Fred got with Bertha at the end? Maybe he realises that throughout his adventure, he gained more chemistry with her than Judy, so he decides to shoot his shot and they become a couple. I say this because yeah, Fred has more chemistry with Bertha than with Judy throughout the picture. That is to say, not much, but still, it’s better than none at all.
My second round of rectifying that needs to be done here is with the comedy. When you boil down to it, what’s really the joke in a lot of these scenes? All the comedic scenes are is just Fred screaming…and that’s it. If you take those scenes out of the picture, there’s like two legit jokes. Are either of them funny? Well, there’s this one scene that’s a little funny where Fred digs into his Asian neighbors’ backyard and cries “DAMMIT I DUG ALL THE WAY TO CHINA”. But otherwise, that’s pretty much it. All the other jokes in the movie are just loud, juvenile, mean-spirited and even a little racist at times, like when Fred accuses a Hispanic man of corrupting his brain because he speaks Spanish. What I’m proposing is that we give the comedy an overhaul. They can still keep some scenes of him shrieking, since that was always a big part of his character in the videos, but they need to be trimmed WAY down. Another way this can be fixed is by seeing Fred interact with more people on his journey, or maybe even have a buddy to join him on his quest, like Bertha, John Cena or even Kevin. The latter could be the funnest of the three since I could see it going on a Planes, Trains and Automobiles route with two enemies being forced to go on this trek together and slowly learning to get along and maybe become slightly less antagonistic. One last way to fix up the comedy is to play down Fred’s immaturity. In the videos, it makes sense since in the canon (I know it’s weird to bring up a YouTube series’ canon, but hear me out), he’s established as being a six-year old kid, which also explains his squeaky voice. Here, he’s aged up to fifteen, so there’s really no reason for him to act the way he does to the degree he takes it. In fact, why even keep the voice? I know it’s his one defining trait, but again, for the series, it makes sense. In the movie, it doesn’t. If there’s anything I’d not change about the humour, it’d be the John Cena scenes. John Cena’s, like, the one saving grace of the movie.
The last thing to change about the movie is the overall story. When you boil it down, the movie is like 93.4% filler just to make the film hit 90 minutes. For one, I would get rid of all the scenes that don’t add to anything. I mean, would anyone miss the laundromat scene? Or the random musical numbers? Or the 30-second scene of Fred burning his tongue on cheese? Or even that minute of Fred just throwing a temper tantrum? What I’d do is exchange them for scenes that actually help the story. In fact, if I couldn’t remove them, why not change them so they’d actually impact the story. Now, for this to work, we’d have to apply my idea of bringing someone with Fred. Now, for example, the car wash? What if Fred and his chum get dirty and but the laundromat’s closed so they just go right to the car wash? I mean, I don’t think there’s a lot of comedic potential in laundromats other than Everything Everywhere All at Once. Or, better yet, just cut it out entirely so Fred and his chum could have one more hardship on their way. Boom, three minutes of filler gone. As for the other scenes…yeah, there’s no fixing them, just get rid of them altogether. But what would fill in the gaps? Why not replace them with something that could build and develop Fred’s character and go deeper into his inner thoughts and backstory? In fact, why stop at Fred? Why not go into his companion’s deep thoughts? We could explore why Kevin bullies Fred, or why Fred imagines his dad as John Cena, or even giving a personality to Bertha. There’s a lot of potential here that’s entirely wasted.
And so, we come to the end, we have a final outline on how this story could’ve worked. Here it is: Fred is an awkward loner with a hopeless crush on this girl Judy. One day, Judy defends him from a bully and Fred decides to thank her after school, but finds her family moved. He manipulates Kevin into showing him where to go and the two are off on the journey. The two take time to learn about each other and interact with some interesting new characters. There’d be a few roadblocks that test their limitations, but they manage to overcome them by some means. They finally arrive at Judy’s party but Fred gets too nervous to thank her and throws up on her. He runs off and plans to throw a fake party with the help of Bertha and Kevin. But before he could get started, Judy comes over to apologise for all that’s happened and the two make up, prompting Fred to stop planning this party and get over his pettiness. And with that, I have fixed the movie.
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