A thug with a coiffure and threads dating back to his long-passed heyday sits behind an overflowing ashtray and an armada of empties in the booth of a greasy spoon.
“All they want you to do is bleed,” Ross Rhea growls.
In the new movie Goon, opening Friday, Ross Rhea (played by Liev Schreiber) is a man who has outlived his usefulness in his chosen profession. He’s a bully and a victim. He’s a hockey tough guy, an enforcer. He has beaten up scores of his number only to be ultimately beaten down by the game.
Sitting across from him is a worshipful naïf, a neophyte rival on another team. Both know they’ll drop the gloves in a game the next night, a game that will be the last of the veteran’s career.
Goon is a slapshot-replete slapstick comedy that will hit hockey’s progressives with their heads down. It’s surely the funniest minor-league hockey-brawl comedy (admittedly a niche within a niche within a niche) since Slap Shot (1977). But the filmmakers may have badly misread the zeitgeist in not realizing that, these days, showing hockey violence as a barrel of laughs might seem entirely tasteless, given the deaths last year of three NHL tough guys.
Goon’s artistic merits I’ll leave to others. What I can assure you of, however, is the film’s authenticity. Having been in dozens of dingy minor-league dressing rooms, I can attest that it could only feel more real if it was in vintage Smell-O-Vision and a hockey-bag odour wafted through the theatre. It’s enough to induce an itch from psychosomatic athlete’s foot.
And the movie is not simple-minded: While the first half is cringe-worthy in its celebration of mindless on-ice violence, Ross Rhea’s arrival ambushes all who haven’t walked out. He is the darkest character ever in hockey on the screen. When he offers a soliloquy about his brutal trade, the film dissolves from an action cartoon into film noir. A cataclysmic end awaits him – he knows it and, tired of it all, he looks forward to it.
Directed by Michael Dowse, the film is an adaptation, less liberal than through-the-looking-glass, of Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey, the autobiography of Doug Smith, who went from the boxing ring to the rink in search of glory and a paycheque.
The real-life goon, a Massachusetts native, managed to pull this off, while discovering that weak ankles and ham-handedness were no significant impediments in his very specific role. In fact such limitations were almost a requirement as they fed desperation to take on this very dirty work.
In Goon, the movie, Doug Smith becomes Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), the dense son and brother of successful dentists. Goon screenwriters Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg can’t resist endowing Glatt, the movie’s hero, with superhuman powers. Think the Thing in The Fantastic Four, or fight scenes from the Rocky movies on fast-forward, and you have an idea of the gore and improbability of Goon’s action scenes. And like the comic books and Stallone vehicles, blows that should exact mortal costs don’t even give heroes or villains pause.
In fairness, though, it’s amazing how much Goon gets right.
Those in and around the game will recognize the types who skate through the frame: the party boy squandering his talents; the Russian tandem who lewdly trash teammates in thick accents; the captain who hits the bottle in the throes of a divorce. They’ll also recognize the sweet but slutty puck bunny and the black-hearted minor-league coach whose players go through his team like horses through a rendering plant.
Despite all that dead-on detail, however, howls from the usual suspects are likely to commence five minutes after the first showing. Goon is so politically incorrect South Park comes off like an after-school special.
