Wyatt Russell and Seann William Scott in Goon: Last of the Enforcers
For a country supposedly obsessed with hockey, Canada has made exactly two good films about our national sport: Kevan Funk's recent dark drama Hello Destroyer (not all that much about the game itself) and Michael Dowse's riotous 2012 comedy Goon, a blood-and-ice epic that was as charming as it was crass. Now, five years after the latter project proved Canadians can handle the game just as well as Hollywood, along comes a sequel courtesy of Goon's original co-writer and co-star, Jay Baruchel, a diehard Habs fan and Judd Apatow acolyte who's made it his mission to find a creative home in Canada.
Baruchel's sequel is everything Dowse's original film was, amped up a degree or three: The fights involving dim-bulb hero Doug (Seann William Scott) and his various rivals are bloodier, the locker-room talk is dirtier and the on-ice action is slicker. The unlikely project – how many made-in-Canada films spark a franchise? – doesn't quite reach the heights of the original film, which found surprising pathos in Doug's tale of sweet good guy to brutal goon.
But it delivers on nearly every other scale, including standout performances from returning players Scott, Alison Pill and Liev Schreiber, as well as some bits of comic gold courtesy of series rookies Wyatt Russell, T.J. Miller and Jason Jones.
Barry Hertz