This Might Be The Best Hockey Movie Ever Made

Rating: 9/10 (1 July 2017)

There really haven't been a lot of hockey movies made over the years. I can think immediately of "Slap Shot" - which was a comedy and not a serious hockey movie. There was "The Mighty Ducks" - but that was more of a kids movie than anything. And I can remember that the story of the US gold medal win in the 1980 Winter Olympics (the same story told in this movie) was told in 1982's TV movie "Miracle On Ice." There may have been others, but I can't think of them. But however many there may have been I find it hard to believe that they would have been better than this version of the story.
It's a hockey movie. From beginning to end it's a hockey movie. On and off the ice, in the dressing room and the board room and in Herb Brooks' home - it's a hockey movie. But it does a truly superb job of blending in what was going on in the world at the time - which is really what made the whole story so dramatic in the first place. The 1970's had been a bad decade for the United States. Watergate and Vietnam and the Arab oil embargo and a sputtering economy. As the decade closed the US Embassy in Iran was seized and American diplomats there were taken hostage and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet Union seemed to be in the ascendance, and the United States seemed to be in a downward spiral. Who would have thought that hockey - which was really not much more than a niche sport in the US at the time - would be the start of an American resurgence?
This movie focuses on Herb Brooks - who was the coach of that US Olympic team. Kurt Russell played the part, and played it well. Brooks had a passion for hockey and for the job of coaching this team. It was a passion that became an obsession, fuelled by the fact that in 1960 (when the US had also won a surprise Olympic hockey gold medal) he had been the last player cut from that team before the Games began. Brooks took on the job and demanded complete control over the program. He drove the players - hard; almost to the breaking point at times. He was their coach and not their friend; he wasn't looking to win popularity contests. It was a fascinating portrayal of the man, who tragically died not long before this film was released. Brooks was the focal point of what was happening. The players, on the other hand, were a team. In the movie, that means that Russell dominates. The actors who played the players kind of fade into the background. Patricia Clarkson does a decent job as Brooks' wife Patti - who sometimes resents her husband's obsession with the job and team and game - and Noah Emmerich is decent enough as assistant coach Craig Patrick - who's often uncomfortable with Brooks' coaching methods - but this is Kurt Russell's movie, and the 1980 US Olympic hockey team was Herb Brooks' team, and Russell pulls it off well.
The on-ice action is brilliantly staged and seems absolutely authentic. Even though we know the outcome, the movie did a great job of building up the suspense of that US-Soviet game, as a bunch of American college players take on the mighty and experienced Soviet hockey machine, which was professional in all but name, which had taken 2 of 3 games against a team of NHL All-Stars (blasting the NHL'ers 6-0 in the final game) in a tournament held a few months before the Olympics, and which should have crushed the US team. Like most anything that chronicles the tournament, the movie tends to skip quickly over the fact that the US still had to beat Finland after beating the Soviet Union to win the gold medal. With everything happening in the world at the time, of course, what really mattered was that the United States beat the Soviet Union. There will never be another hockey game like that 1980 game. It's probably matched in drama only by Game 8 of the "Canada-Russia" series of 1972. Hockey is such an international sport now, the best players are all familiar to us because most of them (wherever they're from) play in the NHL, and the top countries are all capable of beating each other on any given night, so this type of upset and drama could probably never be reproduced.
I'm not an American, so the patriotic aspect of this film eluded me, but I am (like all good Canadians) a hockey fan - and I have to say that Disney put out one fine hockey movie with "Miracle." (9/10)