Mark Clayton just saw The Foot Fist Way...

... And highly recommends that you don't.

No, no images wasted on this heap of stinking infestation. Not even the movie poster.

The Foot Fist Way is a terrible, terrible, failure of a comedy from MTV films, known for such great powerflush shit like Save the Last Dance, How She Move, and the ever shit-tacular Better Luck Tomorrow.*** The movie is a deadpan tale about a Tae Kwon Do instructor who fails as a human being, as told through "little sketches" and musical montages. The "little sketches" entail trite, unimaginative sequences with predictable outcomes that shitty writers fall back upon because they know they just don't have to try when they're catering to the indie comedy set. ("Hey, wasn't that just awkward the way he's bein' all crazy like that?") And of course, there's the life-changing journey sequence where the main character and his rag-tag group of-- You know what? Get the fuck out of here with this tired old asshattery.

As for predictable outcomes, well, they're just packed into this. I could lay out some scenarios, then have you poke a pencil into your brain and see if you can't guess what happens, but that would be just as condescending as transferring those same things onto celluloid and calling it a "movie."

Mark Clayton can't say he really "saw" the whole thing, either. A good quarter of my time was spent fast-forwarding through those aforementioned idiotic musical montage sequences, most of them featuring completely humorless Tae Kwon Do action clips. Now ideally, it could be a highlight real of Marks Brothers touchdowns set to the tune of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion or Heart's Barracuda and anyone would be hard-pressed not to watch, but the sequences in The Foot Fist Way were something else, dredged from the depths of Banal Filmmaking 101 or even that of local cable commercial fodder. And so unabashedly frequent, too. It seemed like every chance they got, the running time was padded with a stupid montage blasting ear-wretchingly "ironic" rock. Without them, this would've been about half an hour shorter and about ten times less bad (but still bad).

Maybe this ham-fisted production could pass its amateur cinematography, boorishly-caricatured characters, and paint-by-numbers plotline with the smarmy "it's-great-because-it-isn't" hipster set and the generally not very bright, but really, the rest of us could do a whole lot better.

Let's make an exception to the image ban.

***MTV Films is also responsible for Napoleon Dynamite, which caused Mark Clayton the deepest, darkest hatred toward any "film" he has ever had to suffer through. I would rather relive the November 29, 1987, Dolphins loss at Buffalo in which we were trounced 27-0 before watching it again.