gordie boggs ( arquette , aptly cast as a moron , as he is one ) and his best friend sean dawkins ( scott caan . 
the son of james caan should not be reduced to garbage like this ! ) are two losers from wyoming with no jobs and no girlfriends , who look up to world championship wrestling champion jimmy king ( a terribly casted oliver platt ) , as he is everything they are not . 
they finally get to see him live and he is screwed out of his title by the evil , ruthless promoter titus sinclair ( a wasted palitaliano , in a role originally meant for real-life wcw president eric bischoff , whose name was written all over the role ! ) . 
gordie and sean track down king in atlanta and discover that he is not really the english king the wcw writers created for him , but a drunken , ignorant southerner who is as irritated by these two lunkheads as bob newhart was by larry , darryl , and darryl . 
they sneak him back onto wcw tv , after which sinclair agrees to book him in a steel cage match in las vegas at wcw's next pay-per-view , against his rival , diamond dallas page . 
if he wins , king gets his title and his career back , plus one million dollars . 
wcw president eric bischoff , knowing his promotion was desperate with bad writing and ratings skyrocketing down thanks to the far superior world wrestling federation , came up with the idea for this movie hoping it would save wcw . 
he was then fired and rehired two months ago , but by the time he'd left , they had already been contracted to do the film , and bischoff could not play sinclair ( which , in itself , is for the best , as anybody who has seen him on wcw programming knows that bischoff is no actor ! ) . 
the characters of gordie and sean show you exactly what eric bischoff thinks of his fans . 
he thinks of them as young , dumb pathetic idiots who will believe anything that will be put out in front of them is real . 
that is why he doesn't take the fans into consideration when he books a nitro or a pay-per-view . 
i have news for you , eric : no wrestling fan in this day and age is dumb enough to believe that professional wrestling isn't for show , unless they are four years old . 
this is 2000 , you know , not 1985 . 
bischoff will try to cover up criticism like that by saying it is a comedy , but i have no doubt in my mind that if this had been a dramatic , rocky-style film ( which it probably should have been . 
professional wrestling is ridiculed enough as it is , why should the first wrestling movie in ten years be a comedy ? ) , gordie and sean would have been portrayed in the same light . 
anybody who has seen the documentary wrestling with shadows , documenting wwf owner vince mcmahon's double-crossing of bret hart , will probably realize via the reviews and previews of ready to rumble , that it is basically a rip-off of that film's storyline with the poor man's wayne and garth thrown in for comedic affect . 
you can tell titus sinclair is supposed to poke fun at vince , but any self-respecting wrestling fan knows that sinclair is more inspired by bischoff than vince , and that vince did what he had to do to bret hart . 
all of these aspects of the film , needless to say , seriously offended me as a wrestling fan . 
another thing i found disturbing about the film was the romance between gordie and nitro girl sasha ( the lovely rose mcgowan ) . 
wouldn't it have been easier to bring something new into the relationship rather than revealing she was only working on gordie at sinclair's insistance ? 
i hate that cliche ! 
the world wrestling federation would have made a better film . 
they are the promotion everyone cares about , they are winning the ratings , they have better wrestlers , and they take their fans into consideration and don't treat fans like morons . 
so , vince , how about a movie ? 
