Ready to Rumble

Dimwitted sewage workers Gordie Boggs and Sean Dawkins watch their favorite wrestler, WCW World Heavyweight Championship holder Jimmy King cheated out of the title by Diamond Dallas Page, an evil WCW promoter named Titus Sinclair, and DDP's partners. After the match, the two wrestling fans humorously express their rage in their septic truck, resulting in a car crash with Gordie and Sean surviving.

After this event, Gordie believes that the car crash was supposed to happen and that they should make Jimmy King once again a title holder. Sean agrees to help Gordie, and the dimwitted duo go on a quest to put their King back on his throne. The next day, Gordie asks a friend to find out where the washed-up wrestler lives. Their friend succeeds, and they go to an unexpected-looking neighborhood. They find King's estranged wife and his parents. The parents tell them that King borrowed their mobile home, and never returned it. The duo find King and become over-excited. They have a conversation, and when King says that he gives up on wrestling, Gordie and Sean anger him to the point where he suddenly attacks the two boys. The boys encourage King to beat them up, which influenced him to return to wrestling. Then Gordie and Sean are knocked out when Jimmy King does his finishing move.

The two boys wake up the next day when Jimmy King drips beer on their faces. Later that day, the trio go on a road trip. Gordie sends letters to his father, who wanted Gordie to follow in his footsteps to be a policeman, but Gordie says that he will not join him in a policeman test, making him frustrated. Gordie, King, and Sean go to the WCW arena where they hide King in a bathroom and they meet one of the Nitro Girls, Sasha. When DDP mocks Jimmy King on camera, King comes out of the bathroom and beats him up. Sinclair, therefore, declares a Steel Cage match for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship plus a $1,000,000 cash prize. However, if King loses, he will never wrestle again.

Sasha is impressed by Gordie, and they go to her apartment, where she reveals her "secret weapons" (she shows her breasts). Gordie reacts like a wrestling fan he is by screaming foreign objects and pushing her off of him. Jimmy King was in deep need of a trainer. They went to a local training center, where King meets his former partner, Bill Goldberg. They also find Sal Bandini, who beat up King. He was then hired as their trainer, but he became hospitalized when Sid Vicious and Perry Saturn attacked him that night.

When they try to get a new partner for King, Gordie's father comes along, gets Gordie and convinces him that his dream of working with Jimmy King was stupid. When Gordie was at home, Sean and King tried to bust him out, but Gordie refused (an ironic change in Gordie as he once encouraged King to return to wrestling). But the next day, Gordie comes at an entourage audition and is thanked by King for everything Gordie did for him. No one, however, was able to make the cut, and so King has to face DDP alone. When the Steel Cage Match started, he is again outnumbered by DDP's goons, but receives help from Goldberg, Booker T, Billy Kidman, the Disco Inferno, Sting, and of course Gordie (in a police uniform). After this, Titus was beaten up by Sean and Gordie (as well as by the fans). Goldberg later asks King to re-team with him, but the new champ announces his new partner will be Gordie and their manager will be Sean.

An epilogue shows Sean telling kids "dreams can come true" back at the convenience store, where Gordie and Goldberg teach the clerk a lesson by hurling him out on the street for being mean to kids. All ends happily as the heroes ride off in a stretch Hummer (driven by Nitro Girl Chae), together with Sal, now fully recovered in a hot tub with beautiful women.

• David Arquette as Gordie Boggs a.k.a “The Law”
• Scott Caan as Sean “Sugar Daddy” Dawkins
• Oliver Platt as Jimmy King
• Joe Pantoliano as Titus Sinclair
• Rose McGowan as Sasha
• Martin Landau as Sal “Wanna Wrestle” Bandini
• Ahmet Zappa as Cashier
• Jill Ritchie as Brittany
• Richard Lineback as Mr. Boggs, Gordie's father
• Chris Owen as Isaac
• Melanie Deanne Moore as Wendy
• Caroline Rhea as Eugenia King
• Tait Smith as Frankie King
• Ellen Albertini Dow as Mrs. MacKenzie
• Kathleen Freeman as Jane King
• Lewis Arquette as Fred King

The character of Sal Bandini is based on wrestlers Lou Thesz and Stu Hart. Oliver Platt accidentally struck Randy Savage in the face during the filming of a fantasy scene. The footage of the incident, which was shot over Savage's shoulder, can be seen in the blooper reel shown during the closing credits. Chris Kanyon was Platt's stunt double, and Shane Helms was David Arquette's stunt double. The character of Titus Sinclair is based on WCW President and Executive Producer Eric Bischoff, who was originally planned to star in this movie as a fictionalized version of himself, but was fired from WCW before filming began.

Following the release of the movie, WCW decided to generate publicity for the company by running a storyline in which David Arquette, a legitimate wrestling fan, became WCW World Champion. The storyline was reviled by wrestling fans, and Arquette himself reportedly believed it was a bad idea, as he felt that it would damage the value of the belt he held in such high regard. While in WCW, he aligned himself with Diamond Dallas Page (despite Page being the movie's villain) and agreed in storyline to drop the title to him. He eventually lost the title in the main event of Slamboree involving the three-tiered cage seen in Ready to Rumble, pitting himself against Page and Jeff Jarrett, which ended when he turned on Page and allowed Jarrett to win. Arquette later donated all the money WCW paid him to the families of the late Brian Pillman, the late Brian Hildebrand and paralyzed wrestler Darren Drozdov.[2]

The Triple Cage was used by WCW only twice: first, at Slamboree 2000, Jeff Jarrett beat Diamond Dallas Page and David Arquette (defending the WCW World Heavyweight Championship) to win the title. In this match, Chris Kanyon was thrown from the roof of one of the cages, "paralyzing" him. The other, taking place on the September 4, 2000 episode of WCW Monday Nitro, was the 2000 edition of the WarGames match.

Ready to Rumble received a largely negative reception, garnering a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 23% based on 70 reviews, with an average score of 3.9/10. Its consensus states, "Humor at its lowest that isn't funny for kids and is insulting to adults".[3] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has an average score of 23, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[4]

Roger Ebert said that the movie works best when focusing on the aspects of professional wrestling instead of the "wheezy prefab" Dumb and Dumber antics and felt there was misuse of both Platt and Landau, citing the former's comedic talents being wasted and having an actual wrestler in his place instead, and the latter being more suitable in dramatic works.[5] BBC film reviewer Neil Smith commended the efforts of both Platt and Landau in their respective roles but felt the film overall was the typical Hollywood comedy, consisting of "oafish slapstick and lavatorial humour in place of genuine wit or imagination", concluding that it "has its moments, but ultimately feels just as bogus as the Lycra-clad charlatans it lionises."[6] The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin criticized the filmmakers for trying to satirize and indulge in the world of wrestling and ignore it for rehashed humor from films like The Wedding Singer and Mallrats, concluding that, "[I]n its attempts not to offend wrestling fans or the wrestlers who make brief, bland appearances, Ready To Rumble is plodding, obvious, toothless, and unfunny."[7]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times mockingly said that the film does a deep exploration into the world of professional wrestling and its core fanbase, but in reality is "not a satire of the idiocy [of professional wrestling], but a long, self-satisfied wallow in it."[8] Chris Gramlich of Exclaim! backhandedly called it "the best Hollywood wrestling movie since No Holds Barred", giving credit to Chris Kanyon's wrestling choreography, the various WCW performers and the contributions from both Landau and McGowan being the film's saving graces, concluding that, "While Ready to Rumble may at times make even the most ardent wrestling ashamed by its use of wrestling stereotypes (some even justified); it does make you laugh almost as often. Almost."[9] The Austin Chronicle's Marjorie Baumgarten agreed with the critics about the "asinine plot, premise, and performances" but admitted to laughing at a few moments that shows the film being honest with itself about its creation, concluding that, "Filled with lots of appearances by real wrestling stars, the movie seems a certain shoo-in among a certain demographic. But if you're going, hit the theatres soon because this one looks ready to tumble."[10]

The film score makes extensive use of classical music, both diegetic and non-diegetic. "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copland is featured as Jimmy King's theme music. "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Götterdämmerung by German composer Richard Wagner plays quietly in the background during King's initial discomfiture at the hands of Titus Sinclair, played by Joe Pantoliano, and Diamond Dallas Page.

A soundtrack for the film was released by Atlantic Records and 143 Records in both 'clean' and 'explicit' editions. Considering the Kid Rock song "Badwitdaba", the Lower Than You remix, is not deleted on the iTunes version of this soundtrack, it remained one of the only songs of Kid Rock to be available on iTunes, until most of his catalog was released on iTunes in 2013.

• Ready to Rumble on IMDb
• Ready to Rumble at Rotten Tomatoes