The Mighty Ducks

Roger Ebert started his review of “The Mighty Ducks,” released in 1992, as “the kind of movie that might have been written by a computer program.” This is a story that has been told countless times about the rebel coach who is assigned a team of kids who lose every game, and changes them around to win while changing himself. Even the usual supporting characters are including: The fighting coach who harassed the protagonist when he was a kid, the kid (Joshua Jackson) who has a divorced mother (Heidi Kling) that the protagonist falls in love with, and the tough rebel kid (Elden Henson) who only needs to channel his anger.

The movie takes place in Minneapolis, and focuses on Pee Wee ice hockey leagues. Ebert said, “I have earlier seen this same plot applied to baseball ("The Bad News Bears"), football ("Wildcats"), basketball ("Hoosiers"), and even hockey ("Youngblood"). The evidence is clear: Hollywood likes this plot. If you are a would-be screenwriter desperate for a sale, rent the videos of all of these movies, and then simply apply the formula to a sport that hasn't been covered yet. The lacrosse team, maybe. Pay special attention to "Hoosiers," since it's the good one.”

The film stars Martin Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez as the coach, Gordon Bombay. He’s a lawyer who gets arrested on a DUI, and his boss, the hard Mr. Ducksworth, played by Josef Sommer, thinks it will help him slow down if he goes on a leave of absence from the firm, and coaches a Pee Wee hockey team. Ebert said, “Estevez arrives at the first practice session in a limousine, inexplicable in plot terms but good for some inane scenes in which the little hockey stars flatten their noses against the glass.” That’s where the season starts.

The screenplay by Steven Brill leaves nothing to fate.

There is nothing that will surprise you in the film. Not even one small one, to show he’s a good person. Ebert said, “We march in lockstep past the obligatory flashbacks to Estevez's own childhood, when an evil coach (Lane Smith) made him feel worthless after he missed an important shot.” That same coach is now coaching the opponents of the Ducks.

There are more necessary road blocks on the way to the game.

We see how bad the Ducks hockey team is in the first games. We suffer the name change, to the “Ducks,” which is named because then Mr. Ducksworth will get new uniforms, and we hear the team’s new warm-up, “Quack.” Everything brings us to the playoff games. You can predict which team wins, or whether everything depends on the final goal, or which coach makes a moving speech about how it doesn’t matter at all on who wins or lose, but on how you play the game. I know that this movie is nice and innocent, and that at some area it could be liked by younger kids. Ebert ended his review by saying, “I doubt if its ambitions reach much beyond that.”

I checked this movie out because my sister had seen the trilogy and I thought of seeing it to see if I would like it. I’m sorry to say everyone, I didn’t. It just wasn’t appealing to me like it would have been to everyone else. Maybe if I saw it as a kid, I would have liked it, but it might have been one of those movies that I liked as a kid, but when I rewatched it as an adult, I would have not liked it, so either way, it would have been a lose/lose. This hits every cliché in a sports movie, but we just hadn’t seen it with ice hockey at the time. I’m sure there are other good ice hockey movies; I just need to find them. Just don’t see this one.

Sorry to say that this movie did get successful to put out two sequels. We will look at the first one tomorrow in “Disney Month 2020.”