Fred: The Movie

The line between crass cash-in and clever cultural critique is blurred beyond all recognition in ‘Fred: the Movie’. Based on a successful YouTube series created by comic Lucas Cruikshank when he was just 14, this feature-length outing follows our titular suburban hero as he tries to woo the girl next door (Pixie Lott, awful) despite the fact that he’s a scrawny, self-absorbed momma’s boy with a mouth like a possessed vuvuzela.

At times, the film is unwatchably annoying: Fred is an excruciating hero, his desperate self-love and supposedly winning confidence grating almost as much as that nails-on-a-blackboard voice. Luckily, both Cruikshank and marvellously monickered director Clay Weiner know precisely what they’re doing: a flailing, desperate creature fuelled by shallow single-mindedness and an absolute conviction that he is a star in the making, Fred is a withering, unerringly precise satirical pastiche of the me-first ‘American Idol’ generation. The only question is why an audience would choose to spend 83 minutes with him.