Miracle

Kurt Russell does a wonderful job of portraying Herb Brooks, an innovative hockey coach, and a hard-driving motivator of the young American team that competed at, and won, the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic hockey championship. Indeed, everyone is great, including the hockey players who learned to act to portray the famous group of college amateur players that Brooks pulled together to form a tight-knit and well-conditioned squad.

Camera work and re-creation of key plays is amazing -- maybe the best hockey footage ever shot (see the DVD special features). Also touching is the collage of tragic events involving the USA in the 60's and 70's, leading up to the Olympics. By the way: I found the (voiceover) speech we hear from 1980 by Jimmy Carter ("The USA has a crisis of confidence..") as moving as MLK's famous "I have a dream" speech. It sets the stage nicely for the events that follow - we all need a dream from time to time, or maybe a Miracle.

And you don't feel sorry for the Russians, this the last vestige of an arrogant cold-war-produced hockey machine: seasoned veterans laying out college kids with nasty body-checks, or slashes (just in case you thought us Canucks had the patent rights to tough hockey). Good news, though: the USA was up to it, repaying hefty checks in spades.

Finally, there is is some insight into Brooks hockey ideas, years ahead of their time: carefully-rehearsed breakout plays, circle patterns of player movement, and short 40-50 second shifts to keep players fresh.

There is a nice up-to-dater on where the players were in 2006 when the film was made, but the NHL careers were overlooked - several of these guys went on to have stellar careers in professional hockey. The talent level was substantial.

Anyway-- good job all around.

Don't let the fact that this is a Disney movie deter you from watching a thoroughly enjoyable and adult-level sports movie for two-plus hours. Kurt Russell does an excellent job portraying coach Herb Brooks as a complex and sometimes ruthless and inscrutable leader. Very UN-Disney-like indeed.

I am not a hockey fan - in fact I dislike the game intensely - yet I enjoyed the well-crafted scenes of competitive team play. Knowing the outcome of the BIG GAME did not detract at all from the excitement and suspense surrounding it. Sort of like the suspense Ron Howard achieved in Apollo 13 (where we knew in advance the outcome, but were worried about and later relieved for our astronauts).

A must-see for sports fans and non-fans alike.

It's hard to recreate the magic of a once-in-a-lifetime event, but Miracle comes pretty close.

It succeeds in recapturing the spirit of the times, the personality of coach Herb Brooks, the tension of the game, and the exhilaration of Al Michaels' famous call as the clock went to 0:00. While there are plenty of minor things I could quibble about, Miracle's ability to recapture the spirit of the Soviet upset makes it a success.

A movie about this subject could easily have been a stinker, but Miracle isn't that at all. It's a great sports movie that suffers only in comparison to the real story. I gave it 8/10.

MIRACLE, the Disney retelling of the U.S. Hockey squad's astonishing Gold Medal performance at Lake Placid in 1980, is not a great film (a TV-movie from 1981, "Miracle on Ice", despite the bizarre casting of 69-year old Karl Malden as 43-year old coach Herb Brooks, is superior, although relying heavily on TV footage for game sequences), but it does offer Kurt Russell in one of the finest performances of his long career.

The 53-year old Russell, a life-long veteran of both TV and film (making his debut on a "Sugarfoot" TV episode, at age 6), has developed a reputation over the past two decades as a very competent, if not overpowering leading man, primarily in action films (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, TOMBSTONE, BREAKDOWN) and comedies (USED CARS, CAPTAIN RON, OVERBOARD). What is often forgotten, however, is that he has remarkable 'range' as an actor, with brilliant performances in the TV-movie "Elvis" (1979), the underrated SWING SHIFT (1984, where he met his long-time love, Goldie Hawn), and 2003's DARK BLUE (as a crooked cop searching for redemption during the bloody aftermath of the Rodney King riots in L.A.). As age has carved his features, Russell has lost the "beach boy" glamor that had often 'stereotyped' him in the past, and gives his 'Herb Brooks' a sense of credibility and pain that lifts his performance to Academy Award caliber.

Herb Brooks was a remarkable person, long before Lake Placid. Despite success in coaching a string of national champion college hockey teams, he had never recovered from being the last player 'cut' from the 1960 Gold Medal U.S. hockey squad, and from being a member of the '64 and '68 teams that were humiliated by the Soviets. Driven by a desire to beat the nearly invincible Russian squad, he realized that a group of college 'all-stars' would never possess the 'team' skills to get the job done. Ruthlessly, refusing the assistance of the U.S. Olympic Hockey Committee, he pieced together a squad of talented skaters, 'broke' them, then remolded them to fit his vision, working them unmercifully for over six months, while spouting Vince Lombardi-like platitudes. Despite his torturous regimen, just days before the Olympics, his team would be humiliated by the Soviets, 10-3, and no one gave his squad a chance for a medal.

But Brooks had faith, and a squad that was 'hungry'...

While the film suffers from a lack of depth in the portrayal of the players (by the way, they do all their own skating; TV footage is not used), MIRACLE's 'feel' of the decade is well-done, using montages and voice-overs to convey the American sense of helplessness in a decade of tragedies. The unexpected U.S. victory galvanized the nation (Al Michaels' stunned reaction, "Do you believe in Miracles?", has become a catch phrase for both the game, and the times), and actually contributed to turning the country around.

While the Academy Awards will probably ignore Kurt Russell's commanding performance (as the film was not a 'hit'), MIRACLE is still a film worth viewing, given our own troubled times. While the film may not be 'great', it's message of hope is certainly worthwhile!

I was wary at first of Disney production of this film. I didn't want the cheesy Mighty Ducks type of sports movie, especially when dealing with the awesome task completed by these players. I thought the film makers did a nice job and the movie itself was quite entertaining. I think it exposes a whole generation to the 1980 U.S. hockey team and what they accomplished. Even though I am not a fan of Kurt Russell, I thought he was very good as Herb Brooks. He had the mannerisms and the voice down very well. Russell is a huge hockey fan himself so I know it was honor for him to play Brooks. For die hard hockey fans, this movie will entertain and it does not poison the game action or what it is really like to play hockey.