Movie Reviews

Okay, I seriously wanted to like this movie. I admit that I don't find curling to be a very interesting sport to watch, but from what I had seen from previews of Men With Brooms, I had figured this would probably be a fun, good-hearted comedy about a truly Canadian sport. Unfortunately, this movie was tedious and mean-spirited, and some of the curling parts were absolutely ridiculous.

Men With Brooms starts off poorly right away, by showing a fairly sad scene involving a young women watching her father die unexpectedly before her eyes, only to segue to a 'comic' scene in a funeral parlor involving the dead man's corpse. Next we find out that the dead guy was once apparently on a curling team with four other guys (all of whom are, like, half his age). Unfortunately the team was never able to win the coveted "Golden Broom" curling trophy back in the day, so the last request in the man's will and testament is that the four other guys reunite and win the championship. Oh, and he also demands that one of the rocks they use be modified so as to allow his ashes to be placed inside of it (wouldn't tampering with a rock like that be against regulations or something?). So the majority of the movie is about their attempts to reacquire their curling skills in order to make it to the final championship game, all the while dealing with various types of friction between each of them. And of course they all have their own problematic, unoriginal love interest, too.

To tell the truth, I did laugh a couple of times. The Tragically Hip show up in a pretty funny cameo. The best scene involves the introduction of the rival skip named THE JUGGERNAUGHT at a local tournament, amidst fireworks and rap music (I emphasize "The Juggernaught" here because the tournament's announcer does that every single freakin' time he says the name, as if we the audience were about to forget it at any moment. If the filmmakers wanted to have an annoying/funny announcer, they should have studied Fred Willard's character in Christopher Guest's Best in Show).

Most of the movie, though, is painfully un-funny. The humour they seem to be trying for comes across as really forced. Take for instance the sign-language interpreter at one of the characters' A.A. meeting (the character is an alcoholic single mother... har har...). The interpreter's absolute only reason for being in this movie is to do a five-second bit where she has to do sign-language for the words "Eat shit" with a disgusted look on her face. Or how about Leslie Nielson's stash of "magical medicinal mushrooms", that he fertilizes by first ramming his arm up a cow's ass, "massaging its sphincter" and collecting the results in a bucket. And the worst part is that any sort of humour that could've been derived from these mushrooms only amounts to Nielson saying something like "I'm so stoned" late in the film.

Some of the curling scenes actually had me talking back at the screen in sheer amazement at their stupidity, especially a plot-contrivance involving a "burnt rock" (illegally touched by a sweeper) that happens twice -- not to mention the most ridiculous game-winning play/shot that I've ever seen in a sports movie. And finally, I'm not going to say that the soundtrack was terrible, because the music itself is pretty good (it's primarily made up of a number of Canada's more popular musicians). Unfortunately, I am going to say that the soundtrack was terrible because it all just seemed like a lame attempt at further 'Canadian-izing' the movie by using random popular Canadian music, regardless of whether or not it was suited to the scene.

Ugh... even writing about this movie pisses me off. It was so bad, but yet could probably have been so much better in competent hands. It's seriously one of the worst movies I've ever seen.