Ready to Rumbleby Anonymous

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June 25, 2007: A capable cast, diminished in no way by the hilarity of wrestlers trying to act outside of their normal screen parameters, and a pretty decent script all come together to make a movie by and about and largely starring a now defunct promotion! Even as a pro wrestling fan, I wasn't expecting much or anything from this movie, and didn't actually see it in theaters. Then, one day, I caught it on cable and I couldn't stop laughing! First of all, because I was so startled that not only did I remember the names and character types of every wrestler in the movie - someone explain to me WHY Disco Inferno was rated high enough to be turned into one of the main wrestler good guys at the end - but the movie itself was so damned funny! You can just tell that the two leads, David Arquette and Scott Caan, got the biggest kick out of working with and around and, possibly, in spite of the wrestling world. Martin Landau is absolutely, drop dead hysterical as Sal Bandini, a tribute to the classic style of "more Roman-Greco, less wrestling" style. Then you have Jimmy King, portrayed beautifully by Oliver Platt, representing wrestling at it's most camp - and considering that Sting, a man wearing The Crow makeup, wielding a baseball bat, and hiding in the rafters wearing a singlet is in the movie, that's saying something. Rose McGowan, I'm ashamed to say, is superfluous, but funny in her own way. And to this day I still don't know how much of that movie was ad-libbed. In any event, truly worth the purchase, because it's not just slapstick and scatalogical humor, although that's an important part. There's a lot of genuinely brilliant comedy. It doesn't hurt if you're a wrestling fan, though.