I know this is a highly regarded sports movie but it has not aged well.Content Warning: homophobic slurs
The Charlestown Chiefs are a minor league hockey team on a losing streak. Worse, their town's main source of income, a mill, is closing and the General Manager (Strother Martin) is looking to fold. The team's coach, Reggie (Paul Newman, still looking good at 52 here), concocts a plan to boost morale and hopefully give the team a chance to be picked up by a different city: lie about interest from an investor, then disregard every rule about sportsmanship and just be complete goons on the ice.
If you just take the hockey elements, it's not bad. Unfortunately, you really can't separate them out from the near constant homophobia. Also, I have no idea why the trying-to-get-the-ex-wife-back subplot was shoehorned in, since it didn't go anywhere. In fact, every single scene that focused on the wives or girlfriends seemed bizarrely out of place, like from a completely different (and one might argue, better) script. Like if Anita Loos wrote Meatballs. Just weird, man.
It's currently streaming on Peacock, but there are better hockey movies, I promise you.
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