I watch way too many low-brow comedies to be able to distance myself from them with any legitimacy. And when I saw the trailer for Goon I thought this isn’t going to be anything I haven’t seen many times before. Happy Gilmour was about a bad hockey player who turned out to be a great golfer, Goon is about a moron who turns out to be a great hockey player. What makes the film slightly different is the tone with which it is pitched.
It starts at 100 miles-per-hour with the genesis story of Doug Glatt being told in barely 15 minutes. He’s a really hard bouncer with a really low IQ who through assorted contrived circumstances finds himself thrust into a career as a hockey player. Needless to say he rises through the ranks very quickly thanks not to his stick skills but thanks to his fists. He’s apparently too dumb to feel pain and can punch like a heavy weight. In the violent world of low league hockey this makes him a star.
It’s funny enough and Sean William Scott is ably supported by a number of characters; his motor mouth mate, his gay brother, the talented-but-stroppy French-Canadian star of his team. But none of the characters are silly enough for this film to be truly Sandlerian, hence what we have is a film which tiptoes the line between our real world and pure Hollywood comedy nonsense.
The result of this is that the film, which you think is going to be riddled with low-brow bullshit, ends up having some genuinely poignant relationships, horribly graphic violence and expertly executed sporting action scenes complete with Nessun Dorma cranking up the emotions up to eleven. And Liev Schrieber delivers a good performance as the veteran rival meat-head Glatt inevitably has to go tête à tête with.
This really wasn’t the film I thought I was going to see.
★★★
