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MIRACLE

By Rachel Deal
Review Film Critic

Click for the Official Site

If you're like me, you still don't know what the term icing really means,
or what differentiates a legal check from a penalty. In other words, if
you're like me, you know precious little about ice hockey.

Of course Disney's new feel-good sports film, "Miracle," which documents
the unexpected U.S. Olympic victory over Russia at the 1980 Games in Lake
Placid, isn't about hockey. Like the Mouse corporation's similarly themed,
plotted and played 2000 film, "Remember the Titans," which followed the
tumultuous 1971 season of a racially integrated high school football team
in Virginia, "Miracle" is a potent, if obvious, tearjerker about those rare
moments when a game captures the promise, potential and wonder of human
existence.

Kurt Russell stars as the mysterious and hard-nosed coach, Herb Brooks.
Brooks, who coached the college team at the University of Minnesota, was
chasing after a ghost in his pursuit of Olympic gold. After being cut from
the 1960 Olympic team before the squad hit the ice, Brooks held onto the
dream for twenty years. So it goes in the film.

And, in an attempt to beat a supposedly unbeatable Russian squad (at the
time the former Soviets were generally known as the best hockey team in the
world), Brooks adopted an unusual strategy: to act Russian.

Ruling with an iron fist, so to speak, Brooks pushed his players beyond
their physical and emotional limits and remained mostly closed-off and
enigmatic in the process. In so doing, he managed to pull a victory for the
ol' U.S. of A from the Russians by, well, literally beating them at their
own game.

In some respects, it's the oldest trick in the book. After all, how does
Rocky overcome the unstoppable Drago in "Rocky V?" He fights his own little
Cold War, quite literally, by hauling lumber through the snow in the
Russian countryside. And, as Brooks pushes his young charges too far -
after the team ties Sweden in their first game, their fuming coach sends
them back on the ice to skate suicides well into the wee hours of the
evening - we, too, pity them as we did Rock. Because, like the Italian
Stallion, who was going up against a much younger, stronger, faster and
meaner-looking foe, pumped with steroids, the Americans (who were
predominantly young college players) were looking at terrible odds.

But, given the film's title and the course of history, we know the outcome.
That said, the stakes are high and the sport metaphors and motifs - corny
and expected as they may be - never fail.
Russell, who himself wanted to be a professional baseball player more than
a professional actor, seems made for the role of Brooks, a man so driven to
win he could maddeningly and wonderfully lose sight of everything else.

There is no shortage of stories about coaches who see fit to mistreat their
players in the hopes of bringing them together, but the only ones worth
telling are about the guys who made it work.
Brooks is one of those guys. And what he did with a team of college kids
who were outmatched and under-qualified is nothing short of miraculous.

Grade: A-

THE PERFECT SCORE

Click for the Official Site

Those little O's. Those horrible questions about the arrival times of two
trains leaving a station, one going south and one going north. Anyone who's
ever endured the horror of the SAT knows how those three letters can
inspire fear in the heart of any teenager.

Although "The Perfect Score" doesn't tell us anything new about the most
infamous standardized test - the way it's racially, socio-economically and
gender biased - it's an enjoyable, if empty, diversion.

When Kyle (Chris Evans) gets his underwhelming SAT scores back, it appears
that his lifelong dream of attending Cornell to study architecture is never
going to become a reality.

Of course Kyle isn't the only one whose life is being pushed off course by
the exam. His best friend Matty (Bryan Greenberg) just found out that his
scores aren't high enough to get him admitted to Maryland, where his
girlfriend is currently attending.

So, with one friend seeing his future in danger and another seeing his
relationship in jeopardy, a scheme is hatched to get back at the corporate
structure that makes the exam, ETS.
Of course when Kyle and Matty show up to file a complaint at ETS
headquarters and are summarily turned away, another plan is hatched - to
steal the test. In order to lift the exam though, they need access, and who
better to offer it than Francesca (Scarlett Johansson), a punked out
classmate whose dad happens to work for ETS.

After minimal coaxing Francesca, who's seemingly indifferent to everything
but her father's unfortunate penchant for young women, agrees to help the
boys lift the test. But as the plans are discussed, a few more classmates
get wind of the scam.

Roy (Leonrado Nam), a goofy stoner, overhears Kyle and Matty discussing
their scheme in the high school bathroom and comes aboard. And Kyle leaks
word about his plans to Anna (Erika Christensen), the class
goody-two-shoes, who then tells Desmond (Darius Miles), the NBA hopeful.
Spurred on by a variety of motives - romance, ambition, revenge and boredom
- the six kids hatch an amateur break-in to steal the test from ETS
headquarters the night before they're scheduled to take the exam. Of
course, when they go in with their flashlights and rope, what they discover
is each other and the valuable lesson that life is more important, and
bigger, than a score on any test.

Making nods to everything from "The Matrix" to "Heat," "The Perfect Score"
tries to come closer to a film that Johansen's character references early
on, "The Breakfast Club." When the six kids get together to discuss their
game plan, Johansen's Francesca says that each thief should say why they
want to steal the test and bond like they do in "The Breakfast Club," over
a joint.

Ultimately "The Perfect Score" doesn't offer nearly as much insight into
the tortured realities of adolescence as the '80s film it invokes. Although
it offers some apropos, if blunt, observations along the way - "The SAT
isn't about who you are; it's about who you'll be." - the characters are
more transparent and one-dimensional than the ones who shared a fated day
of detention at that suburban Chicago high school.

As each kid finds their particular salvation (whether it's freedom, a new
girlfriend or a parent figure) over the extended length of their
unprofessional burglary, the lessons are a little too easily learned and
the problems too quickly solved.

But with its cute and somewhat able cast (Scarlet Johansson raises the bar
among her homogenous co-stars), "The Perfect Score" is amenable, enjoyable
and as quickly forgotten as all those tricks you learned in your SAT prep
class.

Grade: B

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