This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Interesting documentation of hockey in 1940, with some great looks at the game from the pond to the Maple Leaf Gardens.
There were some odd decisions made in the filmmaking. But Frank Nighbor emerging from a snowbank in his Senators jersey and fedora to school some kids on stick-handling was not one of them 👍
Jesse James: **exists**
Robert Ford: 🥵😳😤🥺😩🖼️🔫👀💀
~~~~~
A masterfully crafted piece of historical storytelling that excels in all aspects of production, and manages to create an engrossing and tense film while remaining an ambitious filmic history at its core.
This is just such a fun movie. The Ontario vs. Quebec humour is lighthearted but stellar, and the hockey satire is very over-the-top but has some great humour as well. It's not smart, it's not deep, it's not a revolutionary reinvention of the buddy-cop movie. But it's fun throughout, Patrick Huard is great, and it's a great comedy with a unique focus that ticks all the right boxes for me.
The tense scenes (there's a lot of them) are so exceptionally good. The world crafted here feels so real, and is nothing short of entrancing; I would gladly spend hours with Friedkin in each of the locales (Jerusalem, Paris, Vera Cruz, and New Jersey) that we briefly enter in establishing the character's backstories.
There is a lack of buildup for the main plot point (the importance of the dynamite, and the necessity of this specific dynamite, could have been fleshed…
