Mystery, Alaska

I'm constantly on all the sports websites reading about how my backup fantasy quarterback tripped in his driveway while getting the paper and is on injured reserve for the next 3 months. One article that pops up about once every 6 months is the topic of sports movies and how the all-time great one's rank. (espn is especially frequent with these articles, since they're owned by Disney and they put out a new sports movie every 11 seconds) So I though my next review would be about a sports movie I really like, but doesn't get much play in these discussions, Mystery, Alaska.

Mystery is a tiny town in northern Alaska that basically has 1 thing going for it. Every Saturday, the entire town gets together and watches the more athletic citizens participate in a pick-up hockey game entitled "The Saturday Game". Catchy, huh? Well, the guys who play in the game are really good. I mean, they've played basically every day for their entire lives. You know, like Canadians. So the town really takes this game seriously, they aren't playing around. One day, a former member of the town (Hank Azaria, the dude who did a bunch of voices on the Simpsons), who wrote an article about The Saturday Game in Sports Illustrated, comes home and informs them that he's set up a scrimmage with none other than the New York Rangers. Of course, the whole town goes nuts. More so than normal.

Russell Crowe turns in a pretty good performance as the town sheriff/passing defenseman. (I do give the guy a bit of a mulligan here. He's from Australia. Don't think they do much ice skating down under). And the legendary Burt Reynolds plays the judge/coach, pretty damn good job by him as well. One of my favorite performances is the cameo by Mike Myers, who plays a crazy Canadian hockey analyst.

Anyway, I'm not putting this up there with Hoosiers or Field of Dreams or anything, but it's a good, solid sports flick. It's funny, dramatic, the sports scenes are pretty good and it's got that whole David vs. Goliath thing going.

Final score: 3 3/4 out of 5 of Steve Yzerman's missing teeth.