07/06/09 - Miracle

Miracle (2004, 135 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349825/

This movie was supposed to be viewed on July Fourth, but some things happened so I ended up watching it now. It feels good to watch a movie after watching another fairly recently - not going what seems like months between films like I had been doing.

Miracle is about the Miracle on Ice of the 1980 Winter Olympics where the United States hockey team won gold. Playing the head coach Herb Brooks is Kurt Russell. The rest of the cast is the United States team along with the assistant coach and the team doctor. The team is a bunch of no-name actors but which were chosen for their hockey skills. The assistant coach Craig Patrick is played by Noah Emmerich while the team doctor (Doc Nagobads) is played by Kenneth Walsh. Another minor role is Patty Brooks, played by Patricia Clarkson.

Obviously the focus of the movie is that of Herb Brooks and Team USA. The choice of Kurt Russell might be surprising but the role works pretty well. While I don't normally think of Russell for this type of movie he does a good job. Team USA, for being chosen based on their hockey skills rather than their acting, does a decent job as well. Sometimes the acting is a little wooden but you really feel like these guys get along together and are actually part of a team. It's important to make this believable in the movie and I believe it succeeds.

The other main point of the movie is the build up to the USA-USSR game and then the game itself. While I obviously cannot tell how accurate the game is while watching it (looking it up, it seems some errors are made to make the game more dramatic), it flows smoothly and is extremely tense. The sad part about a movie like this is that we already know the outcome and know how much of the game will play out. For instance, when we see the camera focus on the puck in a specific way, we know a goal will be scored. The movie falls victim to this a lot and while it does make these instances quite dramatic in the viewing sense, the surprise that a viewer of the real life event felt is lost. Then again, it might be hard to capture this surprise and still maintain the drama of the goals.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. It's very well done but seems a bit too long at times. It's important to build the relationship between Brooks and Team USA but at 135 minutes the film went over the needed time by a tad in my opinion. As a uplifting movie, Miracle is a great success, especially the first twenty minutes, so in that regard it was great, but as a whole movie some quirks and points hurt it.