Rattling off the accomplishments of Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered hardly paints the picture of a subversive deconstruction of cinema that deserves to be appraised as a stealthy masterpiece that was hidden in plain sight, but it’s nonetheless a debate worth diving into.
The 2001 comedy won five Razzie Awards from its eight nominations including Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Actor, and Worst Director, as well as landing five gongs from the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards that saw the trophy for Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy be deemed as an entirely worthy accolade.
On top of that, the consensus on its Rotten Tomatoes synopsis adds that “a significant number of critics are calling Tom Green’s extreme gross-out comedy the worst movie they have ever seen,” and it flopped at the box office for good measure after just about recouping its $14 million budget in ticket sales. And yet, more than 20 years later, people are still talking about it.
In the years since, Freddy Got Fingered has been subjected to a quite frankly astonishing volume of theoretical analysis given both its content and reputation, with such terminology as “borderline Dadaist provocation” being thrown around, while legendary critic Roger Ebert admitted that he couldn’t stop thinking about the film for an entire year after its release, despite the fact he openly hated it.
To that end, Redditors have boarded the bandwagon for Freddy Got Fingered being so much more than meets the eye, with many offering that Green deliberately made the crassest and most offensive feature possible for the sole purpose of upending expectations by taking the money of a major Hollywood studio and then intentionally conspiring to do the last thing anybody asked for, needed, or wanted on any level.
Perhaps the best summation from a comment opining that they can “appreciate a guy who took his once in a lifetime opportunity and very deliberately wiped his ass with it,” which is about the best way of putting it.
