Customer Rating: 
Summary: Here's what it is, here's what it ain't
Comment: Slap Shot is bottom-of-the-barrel minor league hockey. It's blue collar, living on the edge of desperation, rust belt culture. It's about a marginal business run for purposes irrelevant to sport. It's people miscast in life from hacks who see themselves as pros, to elitists who deign to play with the low-lifes. It's about people screwing up their relationships, about mis-communication and non-communication. It's about how people hurt each other in order to connect with one another. It's crude and irreverent. It's about the really screwy things people finally rally around. It combines more comedy genres than I can count.
Slap Shot is not a typical heartwarming sports flick. It concludes nothing about good and evil. Or overcoming long odds. It's not about a noble coach or noble players. Or illuminating all the wonderful things inside us. It's not for children. It has little to do with pro hockey.
Slap Shot is often described as one of the greatest sports movies ever filmed, but understand what that really means. This is a dark comedy about the human condition put into a sports setting. Low-end minor league hockey, which is a low-paying dead end for most players, is a perfect setting for the movie's themes, especially when set in a dying backwater city. The characters are losers who cling to their illusions, and circumstances and a mismatch between their ideals and personal illusions has led them straight to the bottom. The finale of the movie is first about one final heroic go at ideals - Old Time Hockey! (and even here there's a manipulative twist) - then decends into absurdity ... and the mood lifts and people finally connect as reality sets in. It's a wonderful, unconventional use of sports in film.
Paul Newman is superbly cast in this film. A lesser actor couldn't possibly have pulled off the complexity in this role. He is simultaneously an idealist, a pragmatist, an aging star holding off the inevitable, a womanizer still in love with his ex, conniving, and personally engaging. His manages all that and more in a completely convincing manner.
The film is a classic. Newman said it was one of his favorite roles. Roger Ebert lists it as one of the greatest American comedies.
Priceless.
