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Jody Hill’s intermittently hilarious curveball from 2006 has presumably been slotted in to ride on the back of Danny McBride’s comic turns in ‘Pineapple Express’ and ‘Tropic Thunder’. What the similarly styled ‘Kenny’ did for waste management, this one does for Tae Kwon Do. Fred Simmons (McBride, above) is a plump, smarmy, deluded and lecherous instructor. His North Carolina gym attracts a mix of clients, most of them adults feeling sorry for themselves. They turn to him not only for exercise but some kind of counselling, even though Fred can’t keep his own marriage together…
The concept relies on doc-style dialogue and performances and a cast of eccentrics you might wish to avoid. While most of the deadpan remarks hit the spot, the erratic sketch-like editing and overall slapdash structure give it an air of incompleteness. Fun in parts, slipshod in others.