There hasn’t been an honest-to-god comedy hit in this country since Porky’s. The only movie to come anywhere close in the ensuing 30 years was the 2006 feature Bon Cop, Bad Cop, which grossed the same amount as Porky’s ($12-million) but fell far short after adjusting for inflation. It’s hard to say why this is, as Canada has no shortage of funny actors and writers. Maybe it has something to do with Telefilm Canada being so nakedly eager to bankroll the next comedy hit and yet so atrociously terrible at producing one. Over the years, tax-funded atrocities like Men with Brooms, Mambo Italiano, Gunless, Breakaway, and all the rest have given Canadian comedy a much-deserved black eye. It’ll take more than one successful film to change this situation, but I can think of no better one to get the ball rolling than the new hockey comedy Goon.
I can’t pretend to know if Goon will be a hit, but I can tell you it’s a legitimately funny, crowd-pleasing picture — crude and sweet in equal measure, and featuring a hugely endearing performance from that guy you still think of as Stifler from American Pie. And apart from the presence of two Americans in lead roles, the movie is as Canadian as all get out, without ever once elbowing you in the ribs to make sure you’re appreciating that fact.
Written by two guys who had to go to Hollywood to make their names — Vancouver scribe Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Pineapple Express) and Montreal actor Jay Baruchel (Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder) — Goon is a very loose adaptation of a 2002 memoir by Doug “The Hammer” Smith, a former minor-league player who could barely skate but was a virtuosic brawler. In the film, Smith has become Doug “The Thug” Glatt (Seann William Scott), a sweet-souled Boston lunkhead adopted into a brainy Jewish family. His dad (Eugene Levy) and his brother (David Paetkau) are doctors while he’s just a bouncer at a dive bar, and he wants desperately to find his own place in the world. “Everyone’s got a thing ‘cept me,” he says to his friend Pat (Baruchel), who operates an alarmingly uncensored hockey video blog called Hot Ice. To cheer Doug up, Pat takes him to a game, but when Pat’s foul mouth incites a brawl in the stands, Doug’s fighting prowess catches the eye of a watchful coach. “You’ve been touched by the fist of God, son,” the coach tells him before sending him off to join the Halifax Highlanders.
What follows is a surprisingly sharp and even somewhat daring comic tribute to the hockey enforcer — the so-called “goons” whose sole purpose is to shield teammates from interference. This is not a safe time to be championing on-ice brawling, what with Sidney Crosby still benched and the public debate about sports injuries still raging. But Goon makes no apology for its love of the rough stuff. The first shot is a close-up of a pristine patch of ice, abruptly marred by a drop of red, sticky blood, then by a ghastly broken-off tooth. For much of the movie, Doug comes across as deeply deluded about the nobility of his role — “I like standing up for my team,” he says, “that’s my job” — and I assumed he’d get wised up. But it turns out Goldberg and Baruchel want to wise us up instead. Without making a big thing of it, they mount a fairly convincing, completely uncynical defence of guys like Glatt and their role in the sport. Not being particularly knowledgable about hockey myself, I came away with an at least partially changed mind.
Whatever your personal stance, it’s hard not to respect the filmmakers’ obviously deep love of the game. Director Michael Dowse (Fubar) stages the on-ice action so that it actually appears to move, which is more than can be said for most hockey films, and he captures that slightly forlorn, ratty quality of minor-league rinks and locker-rooms with a connoisseur’s enthusiasm. His fight scenes are arguably a little too over-the-top-brutal at times, but they serve to reinforce the film’s pleasantly disreputable quality.
Though he began his career as a frat-boy jackass in American Pie, Seann William Scott has been gradually shifting his image to that of a sweetly bewildered naif, and he’s gotten pretty good at it. But in Goon, he really comes into his own: he’s never been more likeable. The whole movie rests on his goofy, innocent charms, and his timing and inflections are so expert and unforced that he finally won me over as a real performer. When Doug first meets Eva (Alison Pill), a worldly girl with an avidity for hockey players, he invites her on a coffee date, then sheepishly admits he doesn’t even drink coffee. Without missing a beat, he adds, “But I like Gatorade and power drinks and water.” Later, when he’s at a bar with Eva and the lights come up, he registers the end of the evening with a disarmingly sincere expression of regret. “Sad,” he says, and his tone seems to express everything he is. With this role, Scott has become maybe the best, most affable dumb blonde in movies today.
Scott isn’t the whole show, however — Dowse surrounds him with the most convincingly ragged assortment of teammates since the crew from Slap Shot. From the redneck rageoholic with the percocet addiction to the Russian transplants fixated on discomfortingly homoerotic humour to the Asian guy studying for his MCATs between periods, each comic caricature feels drawn from authentic familiarity with the game. But the real MVP (after Scott) is Liev Schreiber, in the small but significant role of Ross Rhea, an aging enforcer for the St. John’s Shamrocks. Rhea is about to be forcibly retired from the game, and he has a much more complex attitude toward the sport and his role in it than Doug. In his few brief scenes, Schreiber conveys a lifetime’s worth of pride, regret, and resignation. “All they want you to do is bleed,” he tells Doug over a semi-friendly cup of coffee, and you can feel his yearning to be in the younger man’s still-innocent shoes.
Goon isn’t a perfect comedy — its themes could be better worked out and the narrative isn’t structured tightly enough. (We know the film has to climax with a confrontation between Doug and Rhea, and yet it rarely feels as if the filmmakers are working toward that climax.) But it’s easily the most lively, rousing homegrown feature in ages, and if it doesn’t clean up at the box office this weekend my last bit of faith in humanity will have been shredded. Even if it doesn’t look up your alley, see it anyway, if only to get us past Porky’s finally.
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Scott Macdonald is Toronto Standard’s film critic.
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