150 Word Review: 'Slap Shot' (1977)
Goon squad
Slap Shot was an unexpected, late-career role for aging icon Paul Newman, the intense, All-American actor with gorgeous blue eyes. He plays a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, homophobic, fifty-something coach of a flailing minor ice hockey team in a dying rust belt town.
But the real star of director George Roy Hill’s crude but unblinking boys-will-be-boys comedy is Academy Award-winning writer Nancy Dowd’s profane screenplay, loosely based on her brother’s experiences on the ice. She is compassionate and honest; the emotionally stunted men she writes about are fueled by testosterone, cheap beer, and bloodlust. The team is saved by a trio of teenage brothers who are violent thugs on ice and immediately popular. Give the people what they want! Grown men beating the hell out of each other! Dowd writes about toxic masculinity decades before the term was coined. The ending is wonderfully sad. Some dudes don’t know what’s good for them.
Her brother plays Ogie Oglethorpe, too!