A film that captures a team, a brotherhood and a country

Rating: 10/10 (6 February 2004)

If you live in America, you've heard of the 1980 United States olympic hockey team. They defyed the odds and won the gold medal in Lake Placid, NY. Some saw it happen, but only the people involved knew the true story. Now we all get to know.

The movie follows Herb Brooks(Kurt Russell)from his meeting with the american hockey association to become the coach, to the infamous soviet victory. When tryout day comes around, Brooks has already done his homework and knew what kind of kids he wanted on his squad. Brooks cuts most of them on the first day, even though they had 6 more days of tryouts.

Many of the kids on the team had a rivalry. Jack O'Callahan was cheap shoted by Rob McLanahan in college which he says cost him his college championship. Brooks quickly gets the boys to forget about they're grudges and start playing together, by hours and hours of hard practice.

When the boys did'nt play up to the potential Brooks felt they could the were forced to sprints, which they did all night after a tie with the Norwegian team.

The boys practicing and playing together everyday for months on end forced them to become a true team. Even more than a team. A brotherhood. A family.

The hard practices and feelings of brotherhood toward one another finally come through in the infamous game against the Soviet Union, which united America together. (I have seen the olympic game against the soviets and they TRULY played like a team). A couple days later the downed Finland to win it all and put a cap on the olympics.It was all over.It was a Miracle.

The acting in this movie is superb.Thumbs up to Kurt Russel for his Research in this role. He had many of the same mannerisims as Herb and with his accent actually sounded just like him. If I didn't know that it was Kurt Russell on the screen, I would have believed it was actually Herb Brooks.
The boys in the roles of the players also did a very good job. However i felt that many of the actors didn't look too much like the actual players,(such as Mark Pavelich and Ken Morrow to name a few)but hey, in movies you can't always have exact look alikes, right.

The long and short of it, Miracle is a terrific film and is definately up there with Slap Shot as my favorite sports film ever.
A definate 10/10