Let’s establish something real quick: there is one, and only one, true and perfect hockey film. That film is Slap Shot. It is not only a masterpiece of sports films, but one of the greatest films of the 1970s, period. Slap Shot is a true and indisputable triumph of American cinema. If movies could receive Nobel prizes, Slap Shot would win every one, every year. This has been proven in, you know, a lab. With… science and stuff. Math was involved. Probably.
So, with the understanding that the greatest possible hockey film has already been made, let’s talk about Goon.
Written by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg, directed by Michael Dowse, Goon tells the story of sweet, simple (very simple) Doug Glatt, the adopted son of an upstanding dentist who has drifted through life with no clear direction. Doug’s life changes when he accompanies his buddy (Baruchel) to a minor hockey league game and ends up fighting a player who has charged into the stands. Doug’s surpassing ability to beat the holy living hell out of people lands him a contract with a Canadian team, working as a goon to dole out horrible punishment to anyone who would harm his teammates. Accepting the gig puts Doug on a collision course with legendary enforcer Ross “The Boss” Rhea (Liev Schreiber), with a bloody encounter on the ice awaiting both men.
Goon is not a perfect film. At ninety minutes, it’s simply overstuffed with characters and incident. When Doug first joins his team, we meet a wide variety of supporting players who sort of fade to the background as the film progresses. Both Schreiber and Alison Pill (as Doug’s love interest) are given much more interesting characters to play than you normally get from either the villain or girlfriend character in a sports movie, so it’s a shame that both are sidelined for extended portions of the story. In general, Goon is messier and shaggier than its best moments suggest, and that can be frustrating.
But those are quibbles. The vast, vast majority of Goon is so delightful, so consistently hilarious and heartfelt that it’s no wonder the film managed to build an audience even after receiving only a paltry theatrical release before being summarily dumped onto VOD.
A huge part of both the hilarity and heart rests in Seann William Scott’s central performance as Doug. He’ll never outrun Stifler because some things a man cannot live down, but his post-American output has seen a welcome willingness to experiment. Even when the experiments blow up in his face (coughcoughSouthlandTalescough) I can appreciate what he’s chasing after.
With Goon, he caught what he was chasing. Doug Glatt is perhaps the most pure-hearted and loveable character put on movie screens in years, and he spends a good portion of his screentime soaked in Bruce-Campbell-amounts of blood. Beneath the iron-knuckled punches, though, Doug just wants to love and be loved, and Scott makes sure you never lose sight of that even as he’s burying his fist into the opposition’s collective face.
That same warmth carries through every character in the film. Baruchel, Goldberg and Dowse seem to have approached every single character with open-hearted empathy, filling even the tiniest bit part with real pathos and character.
Look at the way they handle the Alison Pill character. When the movie gets going, she has a steady boyfriend that her attraction to Doug jeopardizes. The easy solution would be to write the boyfriend as a massive douchebag that we root for Pill to leave and Doug to beat, but Goon refuses to go that way. Instead of trying to simplify complex emotional situations down to good guys versus bad guys, it acknowledges that complexity and uses it to fuel the best moments in the film. When Doug does come face-to-face with the boyfriend, the payoff is equal parts hilarious, heartwarming, and just plain sad.
Nowhere is this balance of tones and emotions more evident than in Ross Rhea. Again, I think both Schreiber and the character are short changed a bit in the interest of keeping the film as lean as possible, but what material is there could have powered an entirely different film, told from Rhea’s perspective. He’s like the human embodiment of a Bruce Springsteen song trapped in a comedy. Every line, every glance from Schreiber reveals a lifetime of pain, regret, and an iron will that refuses to break.
Goon builds to a climactic fight between Glatt and Rhea, and what’s remarkable is just how well the film truly earns that ending. It would be easy for the film to be a shaggy pleasure with a shrug of an ending (not unlike the Goldberg-penned Pineapple Express) but instead Goon digs deeper, delivering a payoff that provides catharsis to almost every major character and ends the film on the sort of fist-pumping high note that would have had audiences cheering the roof off of auditoriums, had there been either audiences or auditoriums.
Oh well. Goon earned its audience the hard way: By being so fucking good that fans couldn’t shut up about it. A sequel is in the works, with most of the cast and crew returning. Can it recapture the magic that made the first film such an out-of-nowhere wonder? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless of where the story of Doug Glatt goes, nothing can diminish this first film, and the hilarious and heart-warming journey it portrays. Goon takes several of the most worn-out and overused genres and tropes and makes them feel brand new through sheer attitude and skill.
It may not be Slap Shot, but it is pretty damn exceptional in its own right.
