Jay Baruchelâs Goon franchise, which receives its second installment this week with Last of the Enforcers, is, in many ways but one, a typical sports-movie saga. It centers on a character, Doug Glatt, played with good-natured thickness by Seann William Scott, who rises from zero to hero, Ă la Rudy and Invincible; it features a team of misfits, the Halifax Highlanders, who become more than the sum of their mismatched parts, Ă la Mighty Ducks and Hoosiers; and both installments culminate in win-or-go-home games against the protagonistâs bitter rival, Ă la more movies than I could possibly list right now. While the gleefully vulgar sense of humor also calls to mind cult favorites like Slap Shot and Major League, Baruchel and his collaborators â director Michael Dowse and co-writer Evan Goldberg on the 2011 film, co-writer Jesse Chabot on Last of the Enforcers â seem ultimately more interested in the sentimental heart of the story than the punch lines (even if Baruchel does play a character, Pat, whoâs basically a walking hockey message board).
But hereâs how the Goon movies arenât like these other films: Theyâre really, really Canadian.
Before we delve into the working definition of âCanadian,â a few caveats: As an American writer living in Los Angeles, California, I canât speak to any accurate or meaningful picture of what being Canadian means on a personal or national level. Nor can most other Americans, whose knowledge of Canada tends toward clichĂŠ-level quips about maple syrup and moose â except, of course, during election years, when we crash the countryâs immigration website.
But itâs also possible to see in the Goon series a distinctly non-American quality, and to understand this quality, at least to some extent, as stemming from that Canadian-ness. And in the current moviegoing climate, thatâs notable. As the studios increasingly coalesce around a notion of âworldwideâ appeal, a word that caters to the phenomenon of the international box office but also highlights the newfound virtue of unspecificity, cultural distinctiveness is in growing danger of becoming a disadvantage. While there are endless convincing counterarguments against this movement, the fact remains that of the 30 highest-grossing movies of 2017 so far, just two earned more than 51 percent of their box-office take domestically: The Lego Batman Movie, at 56 percent, and Get Out, at 70 percent. This isnât meant to put a value judgment on domestic versus international business â itâs just to state a fact, which is that if you make your movie difficult to comprehend across international markets, you risk leaving a whole bunch of money on the table.
Ironically, Canada is actually a part of the âdomesticâ rather than âinternationalâ category, but that isnât really the point. The point is that, unlike so many movies being released these days, the Goon franchise feels like the product of a specific culture and community. And whether that culture and community reflects the actual Canada or just a simulacrum existing in the American imagination, these movies still feel really damn Canadian.
First and foremost: The Goon movies are about hockey â and not just hockey, but minor-league hockey, a sport so geographically and culturally specific it might as well be hurling. âThe world is watching,â Halifax Highlanders owner Hyram Cain says to his son and star, Anders Cain. âMaybe not the world,â Anders replies. âCanada, probably, and like, three or four states.â But even more than minor-league hockey â which Slap Shot famously treated from an American perspective â and the literal setting of Canada, itâs the hockey-specific concept of the enforcer that gives Goon this distinction.
From an American perspective, the idea of an enforcer is almost contradictory to the nature of sports. Here, most athletes exist in a binary: the team on one side, and the individual on the other. The better you are, the more you can get away with moving toward the individual end of that spectrum, and certain positions, obviously, tend toward serving one pole over the opposite. But sports culture in the United States is still largely defined by the primacy of the team. Take football, the most American of sports, and the sport thatâs most popular in America. In football, the ideal of serving the team, the collective, is held up constantly by coaches and executives; players who gain a reputation as placing themselves above the team often see their careers and popularity suffer as a result. Much of this is coded racial or cultural bias, a subject that requires far more space than we can give it here, but the point is that those two concepts exist more or less in opposition: Youâre either serving the team, or youâre serving yourself.
The enforcer as presented in Goon, and as played by Scott, doesnât exist on this spectrum. Doug Glatt is portrayed as a selfless sweetheart, a man whose dim-wittedness is treated as a positive quality â if Machiavelli had an opposite, it would be him. When Glatt joins the Highlanders, he can barely skate, and he has no stickhandling or offensive skills to speak of. What he can do is fight â and in the minor-league hockey world of this film, fighting has a strange and unique role. Fighters are fan favorites who behave selflessly; they provide essential help for their teammates, but they donât help their team win. Theyâre like bodyguards on skates, intimidating the opposition and protecting their own guys.
This flies in the face of American ideas about what it means to be a sports hero. While Glattâs reverential of the team and the sport, heâs most concerned with aiding and supporting his teammates rather than the jingoistic notion of the greater cause. In the second film, he applies that same idea to his wife and unborn son â theyâre his teammates, and he wants to serve them above all. Most of all, heâs nice: Heâs nice to his teammates, heâs nice to his opponents, whom he often apologizes to before beating into pulp, and heâs nice to everyone else. He is, oddly, a humanistic warrior, a hyperviolent, hypermasculinized teddy bear.
Thatâs what feels so quintessentially Canadian, and non-American, about the Goon movies. Unlike the vast majority of American sports cinema, they arenât focused on the essential catharsis of triumph â whether itâs the triumph of the individual or of the team, on a small scale or a large one. Instead, theyâre a testament to the inherent value of kindness and camaraderie, even in the midst of ritualized, hyperbolic violence. And from this side of the border, in this specific epoch of the United States of America, that seems Canadian as hell.