The players' wives, dragged around to strange new cities, classically represent all the displaced housewives of transient America. He is spent and rejected, a premature metaphor of what real old age means in this country. Compared to, say, Rocky , a fairy tale that succeeds because it is never untrue to its premise, Slap Shot is a supposedly realistic view of a sport and of life. But it fails because it is false to everything it fancies itself so realistic about. Alas, it is nothing but a cheap shot.
Violence is at the core of the film, as violence truly is in real hockey.
10,000 workers are placed on waivers. But the team is magically revived because three sadistic brothers are imported from the wilds of Canada to brutalize the opposition and beguile the barbarians in the seats. All of this is fair enough, except that we cannot take any of it seriously inasmuch as the very point of the film, the violence, is played strictly for laughs. The burlesque savagery is so in the spirit of the oldtime Tom and Jerry cartoons that I wondered when one of the Chiefs would hand an opponent a large black bomb. The dialogue by Nancy Dowd is as puerile as it is unnecessarily vulgar.