Kukla's Korner Hockey
‘Goon’ Review
by Paul on 02/21/12 at 09:25 PM ET
Comments (8)
from Gare Joyce at the Globe and Mail,
In the new movie Goon, opening Friday, Ross Rhea (played by Liev Schreiber) is a man who has outlived his usefulness in his chosen profession. He’s a bully and a victim. He’s a hockey tough guy, an enforcer. He has beaten up scores of his number only to be ultimately beaten down by the game.
Sitting across from him is a worshipful naïf, a neophyte rival on another team. Both know they’ll drop the gloves in a game the next night, a game that will be the last of the veteran’s career.
Goon is a slapshot-replete slapstick comedy that will hit hockey’s progressives with their heads down. It’s surely the funniest minor-league hockey-brawl comedy (admittedly a niche within a niche within a niche) since Slap Shot (1977). But the filmmakers may have badly misread the zeitgeist in not realizing that, these days, showing hockey violence as a barrel of laughs might seem entirely tasteless, given the deaths last year of three NHL tough guys.
read on and watch the trailer below…
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Tags: goon
Comments
I will be seeing this movie.
Posted by Chris in Hockey Hell from Ann Arbor, MI but LIVING in Columbia, TN on 02/21/12 at 09:55 PM ET
Yeah, they must’ve misread the zeitgeist when they shot the movie in October 2010.
Posted by Garth on 02/22/12 at 12:31 AM ET
Yeah, they must’ve misread the zeitgeist when they shot the movie in October 2010.
so five months after Probert’s death, and one month after they confirmed that his brain showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Yes, I would say that’s exactly what they did.
Posted by jwad on 02/22/12 at 02:01 AM ET
There’s been non-fighters that have been diagnosed with CTE. So I guess Hollywood should never make another hockey movie… or, yeah, no football movies either.
Posted by Siggy25 on 02/22/12 at 11:00 AM ET
Slapshot is funny because it’s funny. Not because of the fighting. This seems to have completely eluded writers… I have little doubt Goon probably isn’t very funny.
Nobody knows how to be truly funny anymore.
Posted by Primis on 02/22/12 at 11:40 AM ET
Maybe I’m getting old but after 3 guys dying I don’t think the timing is very good. It also perpetuates the notion that Hockey is not a sport but a freakshow. It’s no where close to reality these days either. Great way to sell the sport. Have your kid attacked by a neanderthal.
Posted by 13 user names on 02/22/12 at 08:57 PM ET
Anyone with a half a brain should be competent enough to understand that the movie is dramatizing a facet of hockey. See “Slapshot,” you know probably the most famous hockey movie there is, for a good example.
And again, anyone with a half a brain, isn’t taking their kids to see this.
Posted by Siggy25 on 02/23/12 at 08:56 PM ET
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Laraque with the infamous words he told Ivanans—- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIf9tJATX9k
Posted by Siggy25 on 02/21/12 at 09:44 PM ET