Buffer has the luxury of experiencing both fortune and misfortune. He alone has the honor of putting on a tuxedo only to exclaim “Let’s get ready to RUMBLE!”. Michael Buffer is also known for publicly announcing all sorts of events from sporting competitions to weddings to even bingo games. It’s easy to brand him as one of the most famous and prominent individuals to exist, but at what cost? On the negative side, how many times in an hour, a week, a month, or a lifetime has he been asked, not to mention forcibly, to repeat a Michael Buffer-sounding shouting-at-the-top-of-the-lungs voice? It must be frustrating to him that people constantly derive excitement from events while for him, they are mind-numbingly boring. Microsoft Word jumps a bit while printing this, but whatever. During the movie “Ready to Rumble”, Buffer’s participation was noticeable, as was his catching of the mic while screaming, “Are you Ready to RUMBLE”. After pubically exhibiting his signature behavior, I direly wished the camera would have captured him leaving the arena instead of following him further into the action, which turned out to be an overly dramatized three-cage death match between Jimmy King and Diamond Dallas Page.
I am not against professional wrestling in any way. In fact, after viewing “Beyond the Mat”, I have developed a newfound respect for wrestling and the on-screen personas of fighters. It makes it crystal clear that being thrown out of the ring hurts regardless of whether the win is already predetermined. I recognize and have great respect for wrestlers this day and not as athletes but as masochists. They throw punches and take hits, yet keep going.
The concern with “Ready to Rumble” is that their protagonist is a non-wrestling Oliver Platt. While Platt Is an accomplished comic actor whom I always enjoyed watching, I feel like he was not appropriately utilized and is poorly matched to the character he is supposed to play a wrestler. This is proven time and again whenever Diamond Dallas Page is onscreen, portraying himself so over the top that Platt appears to be channeling his inner Jimmy the King at an unheard key.
This plot can be summarized as ‘Dumb and Dumber meet Dumbbell’ perfectly. David Arquette and Scott Caan act as Gordie and Sean, a pair of best friends from a remote town in Wyoming, where all they look forward to for fun is watching Monday night fights on cable while working as sanitation workers. During the day, they work pumping out the contents of Porta-Potties, while at night they spend their time in the parking lot of a gas station that sells convenience store items lecturing kids on why wrestling is the best sport they are.
They manage to obtain tickets to the King’s title defense, totally unaware that Titus Sinclair (Joe Pantoliano), this movie’s “Vince McMahon”, is the true Kingmaker. The Commander has already stated that he will make sure the King will be put down to Diamond Dallas before the fight is even started, and by the end of it, every single person has booted the loser into a state of cluelessness and they are kicked out of wrestling for looking like an unfixable alcoholic.
Upon the accident of Gordie and Sean’s tank truck tipping by the roadside with the fire department struggling with the mess it caused, they view this as a trigger to part from their town in search of the King to work on his grand return. This entails hiring the great, but now past his prime, Sal Bandini (Martin Landau) as their primary trainer. This is something the King is not a fan of at all “I don’t need a trainer I need a safe house!” He is not wrong. As Landau’s scripts have it, the old man does not seem any more believable as an aged grappler than he did as a dying disco millionaire in BAPS. He was exceptional in the dramatic (hint).
The greatest aspect of the film is the professional wrestling element, while the film’s weakest aspect, which makes most of the film boring, is that it sacrifices its plot outline for a prefab plot. The attempts of Rose McGowan, the tiresome sexpot do not pull through as anticipated. Similarly, timid Platt, who could have done justice to decent dialogue, is thrown to the sidelines while Mary Arquette and Caan’s shouting at each other fails to capture the losing attempt of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’s chemistry in ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ When I first watched ‘Dumb and Dumber’ it was a nightmare, yet so was the dead parakeet scene that did leave me in stitches. After, viewing ‘Ready to Rumble,’ with a few laugh interruptions, I realize even though both movies deserve two stars. With Wale’s dreadful acting, I would say ‘Ready to Rumble’ deserves four stars.
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