The incisor that slowly falls from the hockey player’s mouth, just after his blood forms Pollack-like droplets on the ice, casts Goon as a film that celebrates controlled violence. Puccini’s “Diecimile anni al nostro Imperatore” accompanies this scene, as do cheers from the crowd and smiles on the face of the enforcer who protected his team’s marquee player. Adapted from the book by Adam Frattasio and Doug Smith, Goon flirts with profound statements about our cultural love of violence, but our simultaneous castigation of it.
Doug Glatt (Sean William Scott) is a bouncer cum hockey enforcer. Compared to his successful father and brother (both are doctors), Doug is the outcast, working security at a bar and living a life without purpose beyond knocking out those who his boss deems troublemakers. However, Doug is a gentle, earnest individual trapped in a brute’s body. His biceps are defined, and his chest is broader than most everyone else’s in the films without padding. Physically, he is already cast as a symbol of violence – despite his recurrent apologies that happen before he knocks out a drunk patron or another hockey player. In both roles, Doug is a tool used to eliminate competition and displeasure, but it the protection he offers to his brother that celebritizes him.
At a hockey game, Doug and his best friend Ryan (Jay Baruchel) encounter a hockey player who has been placed in the penalty box. While inside, this hockey player begins taunting the crowd with epithets, most notably the derogatory “faggot.” Doug’s brother is gay, so he takes heated an enraged offence to this comment and the beating commences. This moments is caught on camera by Ryan, who has an Internet-based hockey program, Hot Ice. It also goes viral among hockey fans and certain minor-league hockey managers. Then, comes the phone call that recruits Doug.
Although he’s an avid hockey fan, Doug can barely skate, but his purpose is not to score or weave in and out of defenders. His purpose is to knock offenders out of the game, to create the pugilism that attracts fans, and to protect the star players. Having done okay for himself on the first team, he is promoted to the Halifax Highlanders, a team in desperate need for a win and some protection for their all-star, Xavier LaFlamme (Marc-Andre Grondin), an over-payed, once amazing hockey player who has “put five million dollars up his nose.”
A commentary shortly ensues on the difference between hockey fans and hockey players. The former have loyalty to their teams stars, but the latter the experience of being treated like property: there for a purpose and cherished as long as needed, but easily replaceable. The Highlanders are a disjointed team of dysfunctional individuals. For the most part, their players are European, deemed “Borst blooded,” Cabbage headed,” or simply “Chernobyl.” They’re hardly Canadian, with the lone exception of a third-line winger whose most notable attribute is the tendency to immediately repeat whatever the coach screams from the bench. The dynamic here doesn’t bode well for the team, or the minor-league hockey league set in Canada. The overall combination of conflicts depicted in Goon try rather admirably to address the issue of pseudo-integrity and camaraderie in sports, particularly when the enforcer looking for friendship is most often relegated to the penalty box, the isolation chamber in an arena.
Within the film, there are some fine moments and flirtations with profound statements about violence, sports, athletes, and business in general. However, a lot of these are lost in the shuffle of crude characters and a random love story that is never fully developed or understood. (Though, their courtship culminates with a great line that riffs on Jack Nicholson’s “You make me want to be a better man” from As Good as it Gets, replacing it with “You make me want to stop sleeping with a bunch of guys.”) Jay Baruchel can be funny and was in Knocked Up, though here he’s simply an obnoxious hockey fan obsessed with wrestling, profanity, violence, and his penis. His purpose is comic relief, but most often, his presence stunts the film. The same can be said for the ethnocentric hockey players. Random derogations in the beginning establish a discord, but their redundant continuance is rather unnecessary, especially since the animosity seems to subside when they’re on the verge of making the playoffs.
Another issue that arises is Sean William Scott. I’ve often found him funny post-American Pie. (Role Models is rather clever.) But, here, his direction is a bit wonky. There are times when he’s simply trying to survive with the attributes his given, despite his gentle nature. There are other time that he echoes The Waterboy’s Bobby Boucher without the accent or Tropic Thunder’s Simple Jack without the profound stutter. Certainly, a familial conflict is that his intelligence pales in comparison to his father and brother’s, but it’s unclear why his simplicity veers into dimwitted or stupid. It’s apparent he has a lot to learn about hockey, athletic politics, and celebrity, but he’s in the minor leagues, not the remedial leagues.
Overall, Goon is that tale of a man looking for someone to be “truly fucking proud” of him for who he is. It’s a tale that dances on controversial topics, but lets their scathing commentary fizzle out dick-and-fart-joke laden smoke. The good outweighs the bad, and it’s nice to see a hockey movie more reminiscent of Slap Shot than the Mighty Ducks sequels, but like many-a-hockey game, it kind of ends with indifference.
