Good hockey movies are few and far between.
Slap Shot, the 1977 classic Paul Newman hockey comedy, tops most hockey fans’ lists as the best hockey movie ever made. Behind that, 2004’s Miracle is a great film about the 1980 Olympic U.S. men’s hockey team.
Now, is Hollywood finally about to give the public another good hockey movie?
Jay Baruchel, star of She’s Out of My League and the voice of the main character in How to Train Your Dragon, is currently in the production stages of his hockey movie, Goon.
The film’s plot centers around a small-town bouncer named Doug (played by Seann William Scott of American Pie fame) who defends his friend (Baruchel) at a hockey game, which gets him noticed by a minor league team. Doug becomes the team’s enforcer, making the team better in the process.
"Doug isn't about winning," Baruchel told MTV News. "Doug is about doing what you need to do in a given time and finding what you are good at and finding what you're meant to do. In some ways it's a fairly … anti-sports movie because there's no — well, I don't want to give too much away, but it doesn't have all the cliches that those movies usually have."
And Baruchel, who co-wrote the script with Evan Goldberg, says that they won’t be holding back on the fighting violence to try to get a better rating from the MPAA. Baruchel is expecting an R rating.
Strangely, it sounds almost exactly like the movie Hit Somebody (based on the Warren Zevon song) that director Kevin Smith has been working on for a couple of years.
Smith has tweeted that, from what he’s heard, the two films aren’t going to be very similar, but Scott was Smith’s first choice to play the main character in Hit Somebody, too.
Maybe moviegoers will be getting two good hockey movies in the next couple of years?
We can always dream.
