Set out to make a comedy about bad behavior on a minor-league hockey team, and you tread in the footsteps of giants. You might as well try to make a movie about a shark terrorizing a New England beach community or a musical about the von Trapp family singers. And yet “Goon” easily takes the title of second-best hockey comedy I’ve ever seen. (Feel free, publicity types, to use that quote on the DVD.)
“Goon” makes excellent use of an underappreciated comic talent, Seann William Scott (tell me again — why is the insufferable Russell Brand starring in big movies while Scott has been relegated to the land of low budgets?). Scott is ideal as a gentle, dumb Jewish bar bouncer who, after losing his temper over an antigay slur (his brother digs dudes), becomes a viral sensation when he is filmed rearranging the face of a hockey player who climbs into the stands to fight him during a game.
Thanks in part to cheerleading from a hockey vlogger (Jay Baruchel, who also co-wrote the script with “Superbad” writer Evan Goldberg), Doug (Scott) gets hired as a hockey “enforcer” — the guy who ignores the puck and goes out looking to inflict as much bodily harm as possible.
Doug can barely skate, but then again, his new team can barely play. “I get to wear a uniform that doesn’t say ‘Security’ on it,” he tells his dad (Eugene Levy), who disapproves. “They call you thug,” he points out. Hovering on the periphery is the league’s most brutish enforcer, a crafty veteran named Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber, or at least I think that’s him under the mullet).
Doug the Thug has a date with hockey destiny, but he’d rather have a date with a sweet-looking girl (Allison Pill) he meets in a bar. She likes violent hockey jerks, which means the sweet-tempered Doug isn’t really her type — except, of course, when he’s joylessly beating up people.
Scott’s amiable cluelessness (like the manchild element in the Hanson Brothers, who memorably brought only toys in their suitcases on a road trip in the best hockey movie, “Slap Shot”) sweetens the character’s violence, which, after, all is only a gig to him. The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings. Apparently, in the world of small-time hockey, not a lot has changed since “Slap Shot” days, and given the oddball, outsider status of the sport, that’s probably just as it should be.