BURN THE TAPE: Sing The Sorrow With Score! A Hockey Musical

Godspeed You! Hockey Musical

You just need to suspend your disbelief when it comes to rollicking musical productions. The narrative arc flows through these big, sweeping numbers that occur organically, yet everyone knows the words to all the songs and continue to advance the plot while singing them.

Score! A Hockey Musical is no different, but the musical parts to this movie were the only elements I was able to suspend that disbelief for, although I can still forgive them for trying, because the behind the scenes aspects of hockey can be a little calculated and uninteresting, and this film is meant to be an entertaining and whimsical tribute to Canada’s national pastime.

That said, it was still really bad.

A little bit of a personal background for me on this one. I have seen this movie before IN THEATRES. It was a first date with a woman I had been friendly with for a while on Nexopia, which I only mention so you’re able to get an idea of what life was like when Score! came out. We both knew what this movie was going to be, but we were both hockey fans and thought it would be fun. I didn’t remember anything about the movie, but there was no second date, so maybe that says it all.

Score! is the tale of Farley Gordon, his love for hockey, and the trials and tribulations of life when the machinations of pro sports gets its steely grasp on that kind of purity. I guess. This is a film review, that’s the kind of shit you’re supposed to say.

The movie begins with opening credits of old-timey hockey clips unrelated to the movie set to O Canada, because this is our game, damn it! There is then a clever little graphic overlaid on a puck laying dormant in a net that defines the word score as both a numerical record and a notation of musical work. Nothing like this ever happens again, they just want to make sure you don’t forget that this is a musical about hockey.

You will never forget. I am not an expert on the genre by any stretch, and I know this is sort of the point, but there are SO MANY SONGS in this. Like, more than I think an average musical normally has. It doesn’t take away from anything, because again, musical, but also this movie isn’t very good so you don’t need to worry about it.

We meet Farley, playing pond hockey in what I believe is Toronto with his friends, when some 45 year old who looks like he’d play Tie Domi in a movie about Belinda Stronach arrives, punches Farley (a 17 year old boy) and then challenges him to a game of one on one for $50. Why? WHO CARES? Farley’s friends get Farley the money and we establish that Farley is an incredible talent on the ice, and easily schools the middle aged man. At one point the man called all the kids “marginalized members of society” which would have been cool except they were all white dudes except for one black guy. Oh, and of course this is all to song. Anyway, this guy now respects Farley, and we never see him again. This is just to establish how good Farley is, even though in reality, he’s kind of an okay skater, and this is just pond hockey against his friends who all kinda suck.

We are introduced to Eve on Farley’s walk home, who is his next door neighbour and lifelong best friend. Eve is allegedly an incredible cello player, but she’s thinking about falling back on being a doctor because this guest composer from Italy who is working with the symphony Eve is a part of (???) is so good it makes her feel inferior. I too should have fallen back and become a doctor, but Farley wants Eve to pursue her passions because he knows how talented she is. We then get a song exposing how long Farley and Eve have been friends and how guess what, Eve is love with Farley but can’t tell him. Also that their parents all met at a fundraiser for Desmond Tutu. I like that they included that. The piece also details how Farley and Eve come from scholarly, academic parents, and because of that both of them are home schooled, which makes them weird loners who don’t fit in, despite being two middle class white kids who each have friends and active social lives.

Also it seemed weird that while Farley is the SeNsItIvE jOcK and Eve is the musician, Farley plays multiple instruments during the song, including an accordion, that he just has. Already we’re seeing some cracks in character development.

This is also the first of many casual allusions to misogyny and various forms of sexism or homophobia, as while 2010 isn’t that long ago, 2010 is also a billion years ago. Eve says that she likes Farley because while he’s an athlete, he has the sensitivity of a girl. Get ready for a lot more of this.

Oh yeah, Farley’s mom is Olivia Newton-John. I didn’t look into what happened for her to get wrapped up in this, but I sure would like to. We meet his parents now (side note: I think there was mention in here somewhere that Eve’s parents are dead? But she still lives next door and we never really meet anyone that’s even remotely a parent to her. Literally not a factor at all, I don’t even know why they’d bring it up). Farley’s parents are aging hipsters who love academia and want Farley to have the broadest and most complete education possible, which is why it’s not weird when Farley speaks to them in Russian, a language even they didn’t know he could speak. We get the first of a billion songs from his parents where they think hockey is bad for him, and they’re right, but my god, basically anytime they needed to add anything for time between plot points in this movie, we were subjected to a song from the parents about how they don’t approve of Farley playing the game. I’m not going to mention that too much more about it because this review is going to be long enough. Just assume every second scene is one of these songs. Because that’s what it is. None of it really matters because despite all their complaints, at no point is Farley ever prevented from doing what he wants in relation to playing hockey. Ever. I think they just want Olivia to get as many tunes as possible, and I respect that.

We meet a man walking his grandson to school or something, who he calls a little bastard, and in turn gets told to go screw himself by this truly adorable child. We learn he is Walter Acorn, owner of the Brampton Blades, a professional hockey team, I guess, who witnesses Farley playing pickup on the pond, perform one kinda okay little rush up the ice and score a lazy wrister into an open net. This blows Acorn, a man who has spent his life in hockey, completely the hell away. He learns that Farley has never played organized hockey because his parents don’t believe in team sports, prompting him to ask if his parents are communists (Farley says more like pacifist anarchists. Okay 2010) Acorn thinks he should have a meeting with Farley and his parents because twelve seconds of pond hockey made him think he could be the next Sidney Crosby. (Farley doesn’t know who that is. He’s so WEIRD)

The meeting predictably falls flat with the disapproval of Farley’s parents. Acorn tells Farley in his sixty years in hockey (he’s probably sixty on the dot in this movie), that he’s never told anyone they’re making a mistake, which can’t be true, but Farley is making one by not being a man or whatever shit even though he’s 17 and his parents are the ones in charge. We are also treated to a song from Eve also telling Farley to be a man and cut the cord from his parents. Lots of “sack up, peacock” moments in this film from only a decade ago.

Farley decides to go to Brampton to try out because obviously his parents don’t stand in the way at all. We learn that Farley’s dad hates hockey because as a boy he loved to figure skate and one time a hockey player knocked him over. This never becomes a focal point ever again. I’m not entirely sure at all why his parents are in this movie except for the Olivia Newton-John of it all.

Farley arrives at the rink and meets the team halfway through their practice, but goes onto the ice anyway, without equipment other than his skates and stick, and the Blades coach rightfully wonders who the fuck he is. Farley corrects the coach’s grammar before identifying himself and his intentions to join the team. Everyone on the ice snickers at the idea that he’s going to play with them even though he looks like every last one of them and it doesn’t seem so crazy? The coach said the last player who Acorn brought to him only played one game because he “stopped a slap shot with his tonsils and broke his jaw in four places”, which does not seem like an indictment on that player, Acorn, or Farley. He tells Farley to break out his sequined unitard and toe picks and get back to figure skating, which holy fuck.

Farley tells him he’s there to stay so they give him a trial by fire tryout after the equipment manager who looks like he should be doing engine maintenance at a go kart track finds old equipment to wear. Farley, who has never worn full gear, looks at the jock and slowly puts it over his mouth, asking if that was right, prompting the equipment manager to say “not unless you’re a dickface”, which is a rad joke and I don’t have anything to say about that.

Farley rejoins the team for his tryout and is immediately put into 1 against 2 drills against the defensemen on the team. Evidently they didn’t have anything else planned for this practice. Farley does this drill twice, undressing the opposition, who are truly terrible hockey players, and scoring on the goalie who probably should have stopped both shots. The third time around, the team’s I guess big boy enforcer (named The Moose) who can BARELY skate himself goes directly for Farley, who is supposed to be amazing, and levels him with a pretty clean shoulder check that still knocks Farley out.

The coach is at odds with Walter Acorn about getting on the team, who informs the coach he gets one game with regular minutes, and if he doesn’t pan out, the coach can do what he wants. Again, this is allegedly a professional hockey organization. The coach tries to get Farley to join the booster club and gives him a pink Blades shirt, because he is garbage, which devolves into a song debate about all the Hockey Men stuff it takes to be a hockey player, and how Farley isn’t suited for it, presumably because he’s also smart? Because again, he looks like any other hockey player. He actually a little bit resembles Jonathan Toews, and no one ever tells Toews that kind of bullshit. Anyway we learn that this whole time that Walter Acorn is legally blind without his glasses, which makes that initial scene where he discovers Farley make so much more sense.

It’s especially funny when the next scene is the coach giving a pregame pep talk to the team (while the goalie is next to him puking in a garbage can. Goalies! So quirky) and how hard it’s going to be, when a mouse runs into the dressing room and everyone is scared of it except for Farley, who picks it up. Apparently this does nothing for anyone.

A bench clearing brawl breaks out before Farley even gets out to the ice, and I guess that just happens all the time because no one gets tossed. He meets Acorn, who breaks out into a song about hockey just goes better with violence, and then the brawl turns into a choreographed dance between all the players squaring off with each other. Farley is starting to worry about all of this because he doesn’t like the violence. I am Farley in this moment, because all of this is INSANE.

The game starts and we meet the Blades play-by-play guy, who is George Stroumboulopoulos because this is 2010 and a movie made in Canada. He talks about how unprecedented that a guy who has never played an organized game in his life is about to make his pro debut in the Major Ontario Hockey League, which is extremely fucked up when you think about it. But no one other than Strombo and me ever really thinks about it.

The Blades are playing the Devils, apparently the fiercest rivalry in the league, and Farley lines up to start the game across the main instigator of the brawl. The player tells the ref to “eat his rectal cheese”? This isn’t integral to the story I just couldn’t let this continue without mentioning it.

Surprise! Farley is the best player on the team. He scores like ten seconds in because this league sucks. He scores again on the same shift. The coach is still mad. He ends the game with 4 goals and 2 assists, and Strombo calls Farley the future of hockey. This makes the exposition about Acorn being blind without his glasses on completely moot. What is this movie?

There is a montage of Farley playing more games and killing it, then we see him and Eve catching up about how things are going with their various pursuits (Eve is working with the famous Italian piano player and composer(?) and apparently she is also killing it but she doesn’t tell Farley for some reason. Then he says he has to go to practice, but it’s Wednesday and they’re supposed to volunteer at the soup kitchen. Farley is sure the coach won’t mind. Farley is stupid.

The coach is pissed, of course, but it doesn’t matter because he and the equipment manager and Acorn break into a song about Farley isn’t a team player, but he’s a prodigy and they can fire the coach if he has a problem with Farley. Kinda wish the Flames had a Farley when Bob Hartley was the coach.

We cut back to Eve and Farley at a museum, and Farley keeps talking about ingratiating with the team. There is a cut scene where they show his teammates doing sophomoric things that Farley doesn’t like, including a REALLY impressive lit fart. The best I’ve seen. And let me tell you. Eve expresses her feelings for Farley in a way that makes it seem she’s explaining his love for hockey. Farley is oblivious because he’s turning into a real hockey player.

This bears out when at practice Farley is meditating on the ice and doing the fakest looking puck tricks with his eyes closed. His teammates want to learn how he does it, so he gets all of them meditating and they are all literally levitating off the ice, as one does. This leads to a song about how Farley is really starting to bond with the team and become a true Blade, and we see him joining in all the sophomoric stunts we saw him reject but one scene earlier.

(I genuinely think this was supposed to be played off as a big artistic visual, but)

Hey, Farley is meeting an agent, or a PR guy or something. It’s unclear, but he is here to unleash the capitalist side of pro sports on Farley, in the form of all the sponsorship deals he’s going to get when he’s drafted first overall (into the NHL, I guess. He’s already playing pro. It’s all very vague how this works)

The agent introduces Farley to swag, and because Farley is a weird homeschooled loner, he is next shown walking around downtown Toronto wearing a wetsuit and Oakleys with a spiky hairstyle from the 90’s. Come on, man, be cool.

We next see Eve skating alone with Marco, the Italian composer guy from before (wearing a sequined unitard! This guy could NEVER play hockey) Farley is there watching, apparently being cucked even though he’s not in a relationship with Eve, and Marco is for sure an adult while Eve is 17. Why is he on what appears to be a date with her? No one knows. Why is Farley a bystander? No one knows. Farley seems jealous anyway.

Steve Kouleas is here and he sucks. He is being Steve Kouleas and interviewing Farley about going number 1. This scene just exists to show that Farley is already talking like a polished hockey player, but the thing that really comes through is when Steve Kouleas asks if Farley is a boxers or briefs guy. Farley is 17. He says tomorrow the world will know, and they cut to a scene where Farley and Eve are looking at a big billboard downtown of Farley modelling underwear. Farley is 17. No one questions any of this at any point. Society is letting both Farley and Eve down in extraordinary ways here.

Back at the rink, we are introduced to a musical narrative version of Matthew Tkachuk, as Farley scores a hat trick and embarrasses the opposing goalie, when for no reason at all another brawl breaks out. Everyone is paired off except Farley, who still thinks this is unnecessary, and the aforementioned embarrassed goalie sees him unattended and rushes him full speed. Farley drops into a ball and the goalie starts punching him ineffectually in the side. The brawl stops, the building goes silent as everyone watches Farley not fight. The tension in the building was what it would have been like to be in that Los Angeles comedy club that night Michael Richards walked on stage.

The coach lambastes Farley post-game, and Farley tries to defend his actions, before Moose, the team enforcer, leads TWO choreographed song and dance numbers about how you have to fight in hockey and until he does they won’t stand up for him or respect him at all. You’re not a man in hockey until you fight, according to these musical theatre productions. Very curious.

Farley’s parents still want him to quit even though he’s about to be drafted number 1 in the NHL. I don’t know if this is good or bad.

Steve Kouleas is back on TV and says that Farley calls himself a pacifist for not fighting, but Kouleas has another P word for him (WONDER WHAT IT IS?) As Flames fans, this all sounds really close to home, does it not? Farley is an outsider again, alienated by his teammates, not protected on the ice, being gifted figure skates(!!!) and being forced to celebrate alone the many times he scores a goal.

Farley and Eve commiserate about these tribulations when Farley appears like he might finally reveal his feelings about Eve, but it turns into a screed about how he realized he was being isolated by his parents (just a reminder that Farley had a ton of friends in the opening scene of this movie). Eve defends his parents for literally the first time and Farley gets mad. Eve wants Farley to be unique, Farley wants to fit in. Eve is allergic to the cologne Farley is wearing as part of the swag he got from the agent, accusing him of forgetting about her allergy, and this devolves into how Farley has been letting Eve down since becoming a hockey god (mostly he forgot her birthday). We find that Marco, an adult, sent Eve birthday flowers. This makes Farley - and hopefully society! - pretty upset.

It looks like it’s going to manifest on the ice as a player takes a cheap shot at him and Farley gets in his face. Just when it looks like they are about to come to blows, Farley, an asshole, instead quotes fucking Gandhi at the player, which makes his coach really mad, because everyone is really invested in Farley being a goon. His parents are shown disapproving, which is apparently all they do, because you would think they would like to see their son quote Gandhi instead of fighting. These two are a mess. I hope Olivia picked up a nice payday for this one, but I know she didn’t.

Marco, still an adult, has written a love song to Eve, still a minor. The song is genuinely funny, but Eve says he ripped off a Dan Hill song and sings back the actual version. (I had literally no idea who Dan Hill was until Eve started singing the chorus to Sometimes When We Touch, which is an extremely famous song, so fuck me, right?). Farley walks in while she’s singing it to Marco and wrongly assumes she’s professing feelings for this adult man, and then catches Marco kissing Eve (a minor). Farley slinks off, dejected, before he can witness Eve get pissed off at Marco and profess her love for Farley. This is all pretty standard stuff, as you know because you’ve seen movies.

Farley lingers solemnly alone at a bus stop where there is a giant ad cover of the Hockey News talking about how Farley is ruining hockey and has a photoshop picture of him looking like a figure skater. I will assume that was written by Ken Campbell. All his friends from the opening of the movie appear through song, getting him to admit that he has feelings for Eve, and how she probably wants to fuck him in so many words. Extremely weird tone that gets interjected three quarters of the way through a mostly pure if not dated movie.

Farley meets up with Eve, declining when she asks him to come to her recital, saying she’d prefer to be there with Marco, an adult man. This turns into a song where Eve confronts Farley about who he’s becoming, and the misunderstanding from before turns into a bigger kerfuffle. This looks like the end for Farley and Eve. Or is it?

Meanwhile literally an entire country is still chastising Farley for not wanting to fight while he is reliably scoring goals and providing all his team’s offense by himself. The anger with his situation with Eve, his parents, and hockey finally come to a head, to the point were he finally drops the gloves (Matthew Tkachuk, hello), and everyone in the building is so happy they sing about him kicking the shit out of his opponent. For the record, the Brampton Arena was not called the Coliseum, but it should have been.

Farley is so dismayed about the fight, the game, and who he has become. He wants to quit. Ironically, this comes to the dismay of his coach who now likes his obvious best player for being a man or some stupid junk like that. Farley announces he’s quit hockey, and a nation dies.

This is followed by a run in with a seemingly crestfallen but still very adult Marco, who reveals how Eve rejected him, and because this is literally any movie, Farley realizes he loves Eve. He’s also painfully aware that he’s not the person he used to be, which kinda sends him spiralling.

His parents have hired the worst doctor to diagnose him, likely because they needed a physician who could sing the results to them, and the diagnosis is he’s a teenager. They’re happy he’s quit hockey, but worried about how he’s drifting and no longer himself. They now regret influencing to throw in the towel. These guys can’t pick a side. What a parental mess. 

THEO FLEURY ALERT! Farley has a dream sequence in the middle of his malaise where he is playing alone on the ice when Walter Gretzky of all people appears out of nowhere at center ice. Farley didn’t know how to put on a cup but he knows who the dad of a player is. Theo Fleury also shows up and starts singing and you should watch this movie just for that. This all serves to get Farley to realize he needs to play the way he fell in love with the game and blah blah blah, Theo Fleury singing is so fucking funny I didn’t really pick up on anything else. I hope I didn’t miss anything important.

(I didn’t)

(This is back in the days when Theo Fleury was just being weird and not a brain wormed alt-right dipshit)

This all convinces Farley to make up with Eve and reveal his true feelings for her, even though he said he used to think of her like a sister, which is not a method I would use to tell someone I was in love with her, but hey, I’m also not the future of hockey either.

Eve finally admits she’s in love with Farley, and of course they sing about it. The stakes in their conflict were about as low as you can ever get for a movie like this. Farley also decides during the song that he’s going to play hockey again, which seems like a weird time to bring it up. This song went on forever. It ends with them kissing. Very shocking.

Farley tries to rejoin the team, and the coach is still against it even though he’s easily the best player. Moose, the enforcer, and the rest perform a piece about how they’ve seen the light and that Farley doesn’t need to fight to be part of the team. But they still won’t respect him if he doesn’t fight? Farley says he has a better way, and the team embraces it blindly, until they learn his plan is to try to hug the guy fighting him and gay panic ensues. Much like me and this review, it seems like the creators of this movie really wanted to end this and wrap it up quickly.

Somehow that worked though. Farley threatens to never-ending hug anyone who wants to fight him. Despite literally the entire movie, this approach is unilaterally accepted and everyone loves and approves of Farley again. Kinda made every single second that preceded this moot, but there are versions of that happening throughout the whole narrative, so I guess you could say it’s consistent. The game - and film - ends with a big musical number about how great hockey is and Farley gets carried off the ice like he’s goddamn Rudy even though this is just some random game on the schedule and has no implications on a championship or anything related to Farley’s draft stock.

There is a post credit scene where Farley’s dad is walking down the hallway of an arena with Walter Gretzky for some reason, and he asks Walter if his kid was a late bloomer. Which is funny because his son is Wayne Gretzky. Great stuff.

I’m very tired. This movie was exhausting even though it was basically just an hour and a half. If you like musicals and men calling other men pussies, this movie is for you. I don’t really care for either of those things, so I’ll just end off here by saying that Nelly Furtado was a random season ticket holder in this and she barely ever sings. That’s hockey, baby!