The Righteous Gemstones is arguably the most sophisticated incarnation of a formula writer and actor Danny McBride has been working to perfect for 15 years now. The hit HBO series about the twisted lives of a televangelist family features many elements that have become McBride hallmarks at this point, stretching back through his previous HBO successes like Vice Principals and Eastbound and Down.
But even Eastbound, with its story of a would-be baseball legend trying to mount a comeback against all odds, has its roots in a different story. Before baseball, and school administration, and televangelism, there was Taekwondo. Before Gemstones, Principals, and Eastbound, there was The Foot Fist Way.
Written by McBride and frequent collaborators Ben Best and Jody Hill (who also directed the film), The Foot Fist Way represents McBride’s first widely seen work as both a writer and a performer, and a prototype for the stories that have made up much of his creative output since. Like all those series we previously mentioned, it’s the story of a man who’s desperate to believe his own hype, and who goes on a self-reflecting journey of trials to discover what he’s really made of. While it’s perhaps rougher and a bit less elegantly packaged than McBride’s later work, it’s fascinating to view it in the context of what his career would become, with plenty of awkward laughs along the way.
Fred Simmons (McBride) is a kind of proto-Kenny Powers, a former Taekwondo champion who runs a school in North Carolina and believes he is much, much cooler than he actually is. When we meet him, his biggest concern is over which of his young students might eventually succeed him as the town’s Taekwondo master, but that’s soon eclipsed by other problems. An affair, a distracting new student at his school, and a chance encounter with his martial arts hero (Best) all serve to crumble Fred’s carefully structured worldview, until he’s forced to prove what kind of fighter he really is.
Even within the initial setup, there’s a lot of material within The Foot Fist Way that you’ll see in other Danny McBride/Jody Hill/Ben Best joints. There’s marital strife, professional insecurity, a curious and committed sense of self-image, and even a very specific career focus that the main character and only the main character views as an essential piece of not just his life, but everyone’s. If you’re familiar with McBride’s work, that means you can probably guess how a lot of what goes down in the film is going to unfold even before you’ve seen it, something he’s been able to subvert quite a bit more handily in later projects. The plotting here isn’t nearly as sophisticated or as twist-laden as something like The Righteous Gemstones, nor is it as multi-faceted as the dueling narratives of Vice Principals, but the raw material is already there, and it’s filled with genuine creative promise.
Though Best eventually drifted away from the creative partnership before passing away in 2021 at the age of 46, the trio of McBride, Best, and Hill continued to develop many of the same ideas into things like Eastbound & Down and Your Highness, and Hill and McBride continued the evolution with Vice Principals. The creative partnership has shifted and some of the personnel have changed since, but The Foot Fist Way is far from a clever footnote from the very beginning of a body of work.
Even now, after seeing everything McBride and company have put out since, there’s a real sense of comedic invention happening within this film. Way back in 2006, the McBride/Hill laugh machine was already running at pretty high efficiency thanks to a knack for clever phrasing that wrings maximum awkward laughter out of any given situation. Whether Fred’s saying he’s “so hungry I could eat a grown man’s ass” or his wife is trying to explain away something by claiming she was “Myrtle Beach drunk,” the flair for language is already running through every scene.
The flair for blending genuine emotion with the often crude humor of the piece is also running through The Foot Fist Way, even if it’s not quite as well-developed as it would become later on. It’s clear from the beginning that Fred’s self-styling as a master warrior and champion is masking some deep insecurities, and that even he isn’t fully aware of them until things start to go wrong, and it’s also clear how well the film’s creators understand that about their central character. All Danny McBride characters, including the supporting roles in shows like Gemstones and Vice Principals, are sublimating some level of personal pain without realizing that they only way to grow is by confronting that pain head-on. Fred, in that way, is not just a proto-Kenny Powers, but a proto-Neal Gamby, a guy who’s sure he’s figured everything out only to later find he knows absolutely nothing. That’s a great recipe for laughter, as Fred’s frequent awkward moments throughout the film prove, but it’s also a way to inject real pathos into the story. He might’ve gotten better at that strange mixture of laughter of pain in later years, but it’s clear even in The Foot Fist Way that Danny McBride was well on his way to mastering it, and that makes the film a rewarding, thoroughly entertaining watch more than a decade after its release.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.
