BEFORE: Let's keep the hockey theme rolling - er, skating. Linking from "Miracle", again I rely on the film "The Safety of Objects", which starred both Patricia Clarkson and Joshua Jackson (last heard in "Racing Stripes") from tonight's film.
THE PLOT: A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.
AFTER: Did I really need to watch this one? Isn't it the exact same film as "Hardball", only with a different sport? Callous adult, forced to coach a little league/peewee team, but this enables him to eventually find himself as a caring person, enter a relationship and realize the value of fair play, and that it's not all about winning (even though the team does exactly that).
Oh, there are subtle differences - "Hardball" was set in Chicago, this one's in Minnesota. "Hardball" had inner-city black kids, this one has mostly white suburban kids. The coach in "Hardball" was a gambler, this one centers on a lawyer. But that's all just window-dressing, right? Both films feature a company sponsoring the team, which of course is full of unlikely athletes except for one with real talent, unusual training methods, and an improbable shot at the championship. To say these are both by-the-numbers is really an understatement.
Side by side, "Mighty Ducks" shows a bit more restraint. "Hardball" really oversold it by making the kids a little TOO poor and cute, the coach a little TOO desperate, and the relationship a little TOO improbable. Plus the flagrant rules violations were a bit much - hockey's a harder sport to cheat at, I think. Everything from distracting the goalie to running fake plays to faking injuries, it all seems like fair game.
(Again, I maintain that I know nearly nothing about hockey rules. I start hearing about blue lines and the neutral zone and clearing the puck, and my mind just goes blank. I know more about the Neutral Zone in "Star Trek" than I do about the one on the hockey rink...)
I still had troubles watching kids act, or perhaps fail to. The line readings here are broad and oversized, the kind of thing you expect to see on the Disney Channel (this IS a Disney movie, after all) and I just can't take that style of acting seriously. I wish the kids could have been a bit more natural - couldn't they just watch the adult leads act deadpan, and do what they did?
Also starring Emilio Estevez (last seen in "The Breakfast Club"), Lane Smith (last seen in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), M.C. Gainey, Heidi King, Josef Sommer, Joss Ackland (last seen in "Miracle on 34th Street"), Eldon Henson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 broken eggs
There was a time when a Disney movie that used this title would contain a scene in which the coach of the hockey team tells a flustered league commissioner "There's absolutely nothing in the rulebook that says I CAN'T put in a duck as my goalie!!!"
ReplyDeleteMovies just don't deliver the way they used to.