| MEN WITH BROOMS |
 2002 –
CanadaDirector: Paul Gross - Reviewed by Linda
Men With Brooms is an earnestly-titled cliché-driven sports movie about... curling! "What the hell is curling?" you ask. "What the hell is curling?" a character in the movie asks. Curling is one of those new medal sports that somehow got cut from prime time coverage during the last Winter Olympics. Curling involves a big heavy stone with a handle being hurled down a track of ice, chased by a couple of people sweeping the ground around it furiously with brooms. What the hell? Yeah, as if that explains it. From what I could tell, it's kind of a combination of bowling and croquet on ice, and by the end of the movie, you find that you "get" the sport enough to be knowing what's at stake when our heroes make the final impossible shot that could win the game. Paul Gross, wearing the triple crown of director/writer/lead actor, is our flawed hero. His washed up teammates are brought back together One Last Time to make good on their past promise and potential When All Went Wrong and they gave up the sport. There's a love interest (Molly Parker) and a grizzled old coach pulled out of retirement (Leslie Nielsen!), as well as the superstar nemesis that you pray that our scrappy underdogs will brings to his knees. Men With Brooms takes every cliché of sports movies and waffles between spoofing them, tongue in cheek, to incorporating them straight-faced into the plot. Starting out kinda wobbly and uneven, the film's momentum slowly starts to build like, well, a curling stone sliding along ice. Some jokes fall completely flat, but there's enough flat-out funny moments that you decide to stick with it. By the end of the film, with the inevitable championship match (where the whole town turns out to watch, of course), Men With Brooms will slowly have won you over with its charm and lighthearted attitude. This movie won't change your life, and is not ground-breaking cinema, but it cute, and for the most part, good, clean fun. When the lights come up, you may just want to try hurling some stones yourself! |
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The Stranger probably put it best when they said, "Canadians are the funniest Americans." The US has absorbed so much talent from north of the border, that it's fun to see a comedy brimming with unmistakably Canadian humor for a change (think beavers).
