A hilariously raucous and raunchy sports comedy treat

Rating: 9/10 (11 December 2006)

This wonderfully wild, riotous, raucous and raunchy humdinger about the blithely amoral do whatever you gotta do in order to win hyper-masculine sports mentality was an undeserved box office bomb when it was first released in '77, but has since rightly amassed a sizable cult following which considers the film to be one of the best, funniest, most gleefully rough'n'rowdy sports comedies ever made.
The Charleston Chiefs are a strictly mediocre hockey team who invariably lose one game after another. Audience interest in the Chiefs is rapidly dwindling and their no-account, conniving cheapskate owner Joe McGrath (an excellent, uproarious comic turn by the late, great Strother Martin) informs them that their current season will also be their last one. Paul Newman gives one of his finest, most enjoyably down'n'dirty performances to date as Reggie Dunlop, an aging, womanizing, chronically infantile veteran player/coach who leads the team on a sudden winning streak by inciting his crude, childish, insecure fellow players to use every last petty, loathsome, audience pleasing illegal trick in the book when playing against rival teams. Pretty soon the Chiefs are back on track and on their way to a big championship game with Reggie's formally sagging career on the up and up.
Directed in a terrifically adroit and punchy fashion by George Roy Hill, who makes the most of Nancy Dowd's coarse, astute, smack dead on the money barbed script, edited with fluid swiftness by Dede Allen and shot with tremendous invigorating élan by Victor Kemplar (the bang-up all-out hockey games seriously smoke), this boisterous and often sidesplitting dilly offers a marvelously pointed and frequently hilarious critique of the puerile, silly and actually quite pathetic overgrown kid mentality evident in both the fiercely competitive athletic macho guy mentality and cheerfully dumb, maturity be damned bull-headed machismo in general. However, despite the picture's acrid edge, the Chiefs still manage to be a nice, charming bunch of idiosyncratic manly man bozos; my favorite moment is when our jock heroes occasionally make a few raw, angry comments about a soap opera they're all watching together in a bar! Moreover, the cast is uniformly first-rate: Michael Ontkean as a touchy college grad who disapproves of Newman's boorish tactics, Lindsay Crouse as Ontkean's fiery, irascible, dissatisfied wife, Jennifer Warren as Newman's patient, neglected wife, Melinda Dillon as the flighty Suzanne, who's one of Newman's many sexual conquests; Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson as the moronic, barbaric, bespectacled Hanson Brothers (watching these geeky maniacs pulverize the opposing teams with their ferocious anything-goes tactics is an amazing gut-busting sight to behold), M. Emmet Walsh as local sports journalist Dickie Dunn, Swoosie Kurtz as one of the player's chatty, catty wives, Andrew Duncan as smarmy, motor-mouthed hometown sports announcer Jim Carr, and Paul Dooley as a rival team's hometown emcee are all fantastic. Ontkean's climactic striptease on the ice rink is a definite comic highlight. Brash, profane and hysterically unruly, "Slap Shot" overall rates as an absolute hoot and a half.