Monday, January 9, 2012

Goon – review

Ice hockey is a violent game, but usually in movies the violence is the garnish rather than the meal itself. In this brutal comedy, the game is a minor consideration, its central character being the blue-collar Canadian Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), a likable lad, who can scarcely skate and is mentally a couple of pucks short of a fairy tale. But he has a gift for violence and is hired from his job as a nightclub bouncer to be a "goon" for a minor team, the Halifax Highlanders of Nova Scotia. His job is to deliberately spread mayhem among their opponents. Glatt becomes a national celebrity, attracts a promiscuous local girl and is set up for a climactic encounter with Ross Rhea, the most notorious hardman in the Eastern Maritime Hockey League. Rhea is played by one of America's most gifted actors, Liev Schreiber, whose acclaimed roles include Iago, Hamlet, Henry V and Iachimo in Cymbeline, though it's probably his Macbeth in New York's Shakespeare in the Park that prepared him for Goon. The blood flows as viscously as it does during that other Canadian pastime, the seal cull, and the final image is a slow-motion close-up of a spinning tooth the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/08/goon-review

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