Goon: Flawed, but Winning

I wrote a movie review of Goon and learned that writing movie reviews is hard because of the amount of times you have to repeat names, due to the impossibility of using pronouns in movie reviews.  Here it is:

There comes a point when enough people and outlets that I trust tell met that a movie is good that despite my misgivings I have to watch it. That said, there were a lot of misgivings coming into Goon. It's a hyper-violent hockey movie with a mostly no-name cast set in the Canadian minor leagues, starring Stifler (it is also, noteworthily, the first and only big-screen reunion of cinematic titans Seann William Scott and Eugene Levy since 2003's American Wedding). Not something I ever expected to be watching sincerely, but the word of mouth eventually won out and I talked myself into sitting down and watching it.

It takes about fifteen seconds for the first half-liter or so of blood to be spilled on screen, and the first fifteen minutes consist of more or less nonstop profanity and violence sandwiched between two montages of exposition. The first introduces us to our protagonist, the soft-spoken security guard/object of his parents' disappointment Doug Glatt, the second introduces him to hockey in that familiar sports movie trope of “guy from street discovers natural ability and becomes Next Big Thing in his sport.” This does not, however, go down the road of the hero forgetting his roots and becoming too big for himself; there is no second act conflict where he compromises his values out of greed or hubris. Glatt is a symbol for every romantic ideal we have about sports, and the writers go to great lengths to keep it that way. There is a poignant moment when the team's resident hotshot former first draft pick NHL washout spits on the logo on the floor of the locker room after being chewed out by the coach and Glatt wordlessly gets down on all fours and cleans it up. He literally utters the phrase, “I'm here to do whatever they need me to do, you know? If they need me to bleed, I'll bleed for my team.” The movie's greatest feat, and what makes it a good movie in my mind, is managing to make a character who says a line like that not seem trite.

For all its predictability, though, Goon keeps the audience guessing what exactly they're watching. There are enough genuine laughs that it easily earns the designation of a comedy but the general tone of the movie is heavy enough that it could be billed as a drama with a lot of laughs. The relationship between the two puts the viewer almost constantly in the awkward position of not knowing whether or not they should feel bad, laugh, or feel bad for laughing. This identity crisis carries onto the characters; nearly every character in the film is either totally one-dimensional, or someone who may genuinely have a personality disorder. Is Doug as dumb as the movie wants you to think he is, or is he as occasionally sharp as his dialogue? Is his love interest Eva a sex maniac as she says, or a committed girlfriend who feels crushing guilt at the slightest indiscretions as she is portrayed by Allison Pill? Even the film's loose antagonist, a hockey goon in his twilight, Ross Rhea, is alternately shown to be an alright guy and a total asshole. I'd like to dig really deep and think that all of this is an intentional feature of a script that is perhaps a nod the long-term mental health consequences of hockey or maybe a meta-reflection of the film's tone, but that's probably too much of a stretch for what just feels like intermittently sloppy writing.

Despite all of that, though, Seann William Scott gives a surprisingly very good performance, for which I give a lot of credit to director Michael Dowse. To use a sports analogy, he used Scott like a rookie quarterback in the NFL: hand the ball off a lot, and make safe throws early to build confidence in the early part of the game, and get more ambitious later. Dialogue-wise, Glatt feels almost like a passive observer in the film for the first 30 minutes, speaking very sparingly and letting other characters move the story along. This changes as he gets more involved with Eva and more comfortable in his new career, but you can't help but wonder if Dowse wasn't protecting him, as it were, in the first act. To Stifler's credit, though, it was a heartfelt and well-played performance of a character with considerable depth.

Overall, I would say Goon is a good but not great film that works in spite of its sometimes clumsy writing or forays into the cliché. It works because the story it tells reminds us of why we love sports. And just like in sports, it's pretty easy to see past all the warts to get to the good stuff.