Goon is based off the life of Doug Smith, a boxer turned minor league hockey enforcer from Massachusetts who played for various teams in various leagues from the late 80s through the late 90s. Seann William Scott plays Doug Glatt, a bouncer from a small city in Massachusetts who is signed by a local lower division minor league hockey team to be their enforcer after he beats up an opposing player that rushed into the stands. He can't play, he can barely skate, but he can fight. The coach has a brother coaching a minor league team in Halifax that needs an enforcer to protect their star player, so he gets the call up, finds love, finds himself, and helps the team from Halifax make the playoffs in their league.
Like most sports movies, this one ultimately devolved into the Rocky/Bad News Bears paradigm. It had its fun moments, and there were great performances by Scott, Kim Coates, Jay Baruchel, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber, Allison Pill, and one of my personal favorites, Nicholas Campbell--also loved seeing Jonathan Cherry from WolfCop; but because the plot is essentially stuff we've seen before, I found myself checking the timer to see where we were, and mentally ticking off milestones in the story the way I would tick off milestones at a wedding, waiting for it to wrap up. You know what I mean: best man toast? Check. Bride dance with father? Check. This is kind of the same thing: hero meets girl? Check. Hero faces adversity? Check. Hero overcomes adversity? Check. Hero loses girl and faces more adversity? Check. This did its best to not be paint-by-numbers, but it's hard when we've seen the drawing before, and it's just this time the colors were nicer.
As I'm wont to do when it comes to these reviews, here's what I think could have been done to make this better. In the credits we see actual footage of the real Doug Smith fighting, and then getting interviewed about it after, and it was amazing. He had an authentic Mass accent, a slight mullet, and he was speaking over grainy late 80s/early 90s home video footage of his games. That's what the movie should have been, a documentary on this larger-than-life figure. When it's dramatized, it can only turn into Rocky or The Bad News Bears, and we've seen those before; when it's a documentary, it's real, it's raw, and it's compelling. That's the thing with sports: it's the most dynamic, dramatic storytelling there is, so to build on that, you either have to do Rocky, or you have to go outside the box like a Bend it Like Beckham or Raging Bull--or even Slap Shot. I had fun with this movie, but seeing and hearing the real Doug Smith in the credits made me realize what I really missed.
But then you ask, "Matt, if this were a documentary, we wouldn't have DTVC favorite Kim Coates!" I hear you, and I thought of that too. He'd have to be the host/narrator. As I mentioned above, this also had Nicholas Campbell, great actor that I know best for Da Vinci's Inquest. He plays Doug Glatt's first coach, and when Doug leaves him to move up in ranks, I'm thinking "no, how can you improve on Campbell?" And maybe Coates isn't an improvement on Campbell, but at the very least he's a worthy replacement. For me, it was a nice respite to have him play a hard-nosed yet endearing hockey coach, as opposed to the jerks and villains he usually plays that I find myself rooting for when I know I shouldn't.
Eugene Levy had a small roll in this as Doug Glatt's dad. His character is a jerk, and I wish they had maybe thrown in some pratfalls or a funny accent or something to redeem it a bit for us. I think of all those great Christopher Guest films he's done, and it's like "oh no, stop being a jerk to Seann William Scott!" Maybe that was the trade-off: for Coates to be a good guy in a movie, Levy had to be a baddie in order to maintain the Canadian actor balance. I'm willing to accept that.
I grew up a huge hockey fan. I remember my friend and I hiding below the banks of the pond we played on because it was too early in the season for skating and probably wasn't safe enough, so a neighbor called the cops on us. While the Bruins were my big team, I used to go more often to see the Maine Mariners, and later the Portland Pirates, in Portland, ME; and then when I went to UMaine it was all about college hockey and the Black bears. I say all this because I feel it's necessary to demonstrate my hockey fan credentials if I'm going to critique this movie. I wasn't going in expecting Slap Shot, but it unfortunately did devolve into the Rocky/Bad New Bears paradigm, which I felt was less compelling than a documentary on Doug Smith would have been, and that's why I can't fully recommend this, even though it had its fun moments.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1456635
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