Yes, I’m a fan of curling. deal with it.
So it was with some interest last year while watching the Brier that they were advertising a curling movie, Men With Brooms, starring Leslie Nielsen, Paul Gross, and Molly Parker.
Not surprisingly, it only played in theaters in Canada. To my surprise, I found it was available this year at amazon on video and DVD, so I grabbed a copy.
The story is right out of the Sports Movie Cliche Handbook: a team of curlers with great promise breaks up for reasons never really explained; the coach of the team dies of a heart attack, and leaves a video demanding the team get back together and fulfill his dream. Each team member has his own demons and challenges, but they rise to the occasion, suffer setbacks, break up, face their demons and get back together for the final run.
Leslie Nielsen plays the father of one of the team members and coach for the rebuilt team — and as the old guy in the movie who survives on pschelic mushrooms has some of the best lines in the movie, enhanced by his sense of timing.
But it’s not enough to save this movie. it can’t decide it it wants to be Bull Durham, Caddyshack, or some teenage raunch movie, so it tries to be all three at once, and succeeds at none of them.
The Bull Durham parts come from characters trying to face up to mistakes in their past to see if they live them down to succeed this time, and wondering if they still have it in them to do so.
The Caddyshack aspects come from the reality that you can’t have a Leslie Nielsen movie without comedy and slapstick. Unfortunately, none of it is sustained, and most of it just isn’t that funny, and all of it seems to be placed in the storyline to keep you from really getting to know or care about the characters trying to do the Bull Durham thing.
And then when they couldn’t figure out what else to do to move things along, they generally seemed to have decided to take a couple of the characters and send them more or less off-stage to get more or less naked, to do some more or less humping, most of which has little to do with the main plot. One of the taemmates, however, is strugglling against abysmally low sperm counts in his attempts to get his wife pregnant, which leads to the ability to randomly insert scenes of his wife running in yelling “honey! I’m ovulating” and them running off to go screw.
The movie is rife with anti-american sniping, which in all honesty, I don’t mind, except most of it isn’t all that well done.
Overall, I give the movie a C-. There are worse ways to waste an evening, but at the same time, it could have been a much better movie with some focus and better scriptwriting. As an intorduction to curling for non-curling fans, it’s pretty useless. I’d recommend this movie mostly to those looking to spend an evening where you don’t have to think too hard, and you don’t mind improving the movie with a couple of Molson’s or Moosehead’s.
(do they win the ultimate battle? Let’s just say the final battle comes down to winning at all costs vs. winning with honor, and honor wins out, but in a way I found ambiguous and unsatisfying…)
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Men With Brooms. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.
