Slap Shot 3: The Junior League
The original 1977 Slap Shot was one of the Grand Sports Movies Of All Time, a raunchy, vulgar, awesomely politically incorrect comedy classic featuring Paul Newman at his all time acerbic best backed up by a tremendous supporting cast of miscreants and misanthropes including the legendary Hansen Brothers. Part 2 of the series is best seen as a noble failure, bringing back The Hansens for a watered down retread but still somewhat watchable. As for Part 3, released in 2008, they went and did the worst thing they could to soil and bastardize the franchise: they actually made it a fuckin FAMILY movie, complete with a PG rating and populated by a pretty young cast that one figures probably flunked out on auditions for a One Tree Hill episode, even as the film stomach wrenchingly goes the route of trying to capture the vibe of that awful show by filling the soundtrack with terrible wannabe deep pop songs during the love scenes involving the two leads. The cast is headed off by Greyston Holt, your typical pretty boy with no soul playing the senior resident at a boy’s orphanage in the original film’s setting of Charlestown, PA. Turns out the town is still dying off 30 years after the first film, and now a nasty real estate developer (Lynda Boyd, giving a ghoulish performance that might remind some of Julianne Moore at her campy worst) is buying up all the property and using eminent domain to seize all the rest as she dreams of putting in a fancy golf course. Turns out her spoiled rotten pretty boy son is also a state hockey champion, but more on that later. With the owner of the orphanage MIA (and never to turn up), the Holt character comes up with the bright idea of having he and the other orphan boys join a junior hockey league, thus rallying the town behind them to stand up to the developer and stop her in her tracks (no I’m not making this up), even going so far as enlisting the Hansens to sponsor the team despite the fact they’ve sworn off their hooligan ways and have turned to Eastern mysticism as a new way of living their lives (ie they turned into pussies). Once the Hansens attend a ceremony to retire their jerseys, their imploring the crowd to reject the violence of hockey and embrace their new lifestyle inspires a hail of garbage to be thrown at them, which in turn wakes them up and leads them back to their old selves, training the boy players in the fine art of beating the shit out of your opponents in order to win games. Meanwhile our lead actor Holt has a kinda sorta relationship going on with the cute daughter of the local rink owner (and is herself a top female hockey player) but when they go on their first real date and she aggressively begs him to kiss her, his utter hesitation and then refusal only adds to the long standing stereotype that Pretty Boy = GAY. To make things worse we have Leslie Nielsen as the Town Mayor drifting in and out of the film and seeming so listless that one would think that he might be near death (and he was, dying sadly less than two years after filming). It all leads to the big final game against the developer’s son’s team where we also get useless cameos from real life NHL legends Mark Messier and Doug Gilmour collecting quick paychecks with an embarrassed look on their faces. Unlike the original where every supporting part was a hilariously drawn caricature, the other members of the team are barely developed, save for a smaller kid who becomes a maniac any time he eats candy (oh ha ha). Really all this adds up to is complete garbage, a lame (and hopefully, the last) attempt to cash in on a brand name film that represented one of the greatest in all of comedy…
2/10