FILM REVIEW; A Hollywood Ending From Real Life (original) (raw)

Movies|FILM REVIEW; A Hollywood Ending From Real Life

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/06/movies/film-review-a-hollywood-ending-from-real-life.html

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FILM REVIEW

Miracle

Directed by Gavin O'Connor

Biography, Drama, History, Sport

2h 15m

Feb. 6, 2004

''Miracle,'' the movie version of the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team's Cinderella season, faces a hurdle that most fact-based films don't have to contemplate: the actual story the picture is based on was so corny and rousing that it hit all the notes many filmmakers would have too much shame to embrace. Fortunately -- or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it -- Disney, the studio that brought us ''The Rookie'' and ''The Mighty Ducks'' (the movie and the team/merchandising operation), has no such restraint.

Accordingly, ''Miracle'' does a yeoman's job of recycling the day-old dough that passes for its story. You can feel the film chafing against restrictions, given that many of the principals, like the goalie Jim Craig (Eddie Cahill) and the team captain Mike Eruzione (Patrick O'Brien Demsey), are still alive.

And since ''Miracle,'' which opens nationwide today, is aimed mostly at an audience that wasn't even born when the coach Herb Brooks's boys defeated the fearsome Soviet hockey team at Lake Placid, N.Y., younger audiences may not recognize the picture's staleness; that may make ''Miracle'' chewier. The movie efficiently delivers the story points, though nonsports fans should be warned: the climax features an almost 20-minute re-creation of the penultimate 1980 game between the Americans and the Soviets. (Team U.S.A. won the gold in the next game, against Finland, which the movie glides over.)

The voice-over from Kurt Russell (as Brooks, the taciturn, determined misfit who seizes the chance to lead the team his way when it is offered) recognizes that this event preceded the Dream Team invention. That device allowed American professionals to play in the Olympics, as well as professionals on other nations' teams.

The sad truth is that the United States Olympic basketball team has now become the equivalent of the dominating Soviets.

The Soviet hockey players were then the experienced, intimidating squad that whipped all comers, including a National Hockey League all-star team and, a week before the Olympics began, the very squad that Brooks assembled in an exhibition game. (Brooks, who died in an auto accident last year, once joked that he knew his team had already lost that game when he saw them applauding as their opponents took the ice.)

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