Michael Dowse’s hockey comedy Goon is crude, violent and deeply enjoyable. It also offers the chance to see Liev Schreiber — a guy who’s played Hamlet, ferchrissakes — living it up as a bloodthirsty minor-league thug in the kind of ’70s eight-track-guy mustache that only hockey players, bless their hearts, still try to get away with. That, to me, is catnip in the form of a hockey puck.
In Goon, Seann William Scott plays Doug Glatt, the son of a respected New England surgeon (played by the always-rad Eugene Levy) who hasn’t come close to fulfilling his family’s expectations: He’s a scrappy, bulked-up guy who works as a bouncer at a local watering hole, the only sort of job he seems suited for, until the coach of a local hockey team catches some video footage showing how, during a chance encounter, he easily beats the pants off a mouthy hockey player. Doug is invited to try out and shows up in a pair of borrowed figure skates — they’re like dainty white cupcakes struggling to support the girth of his padded uniform — and makes the team not because he can skate or pass or defend the goal, but simply because he can brawl. Before long, Doug scrambles his way onto one of the stronger minor-league teams, the Halifax Highlanders, where he’s seen as the heir to the throne that Schreiber’s rough-and-tumble Ross Rhea, who plays for a rival team, has been perched on for years. His dual assignments as a new Highlander: To bring back the mojo of one of the team’s best players – he has the too-perfect name Xavier LaFlamme, and he’s played by Marc-André Grondin — whom Rhea roundly smacked upside the head the previous season. And, of course, to fight.
If you’re…
Full Story »
