| Do you often think about how you need a curling meets the Rhode Island mob in a romantic comedy? No, I didn’t think so. And yet, somebody thought The Roaring Game would find an audience. It’s a comedy making fun of curling as a sport, and making fun of underdog sports movies while being an underdog sports movie about curling. Except not true underdogs, they are funded by the mob with influential bettors behind them. | | 2025
Directed by: Tom DeNucci
Screenplay by: Tom DeNucci
Starring: Darin Brooks, Fivel Stewart, Justin Chatwin, and Mickey Rourke
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Rickey (Darin Brooks) is embarrassed about his job as a janitor so he tells his girlfriend, a professional hockey player, that he’s a bounty hunter, and then somehow keeps that lie up for years. When Kelly (Fivel Stewart) inevitably learns the truth and breaks up with him for lying, he does the only natural thing to try and win her back: go to his father, a mob boss who just got out of prison, and ask for $10,000 to create a curling team and join the Team USA qualifiers. Of course neither Rickey nor his janitor buddies have any curling or any athletic experience.
Kelly is a great character, she’s also flanked by a hilarious character played by Justin Chatwin as you have never seen him before. He’s a former NHL player who now coaches women’s hockey since it’s naturally a great place to meet girls. He’s a hockey player with obviously fake teeth and no brain cells, so that is at least quite logical to him. The humour in this movie is as low-class as you can get, lots of fart jokes and men being stupid jokes. Chatwin however does not hold back and earns the occasional laugh.
Twenty-four years ago, a Canadian movie called Men with Brooms, about – you guessed it – a group of four guys who become a curling team and win a bonspiel, got a wide theatrical release and was able to sell out theaters on opening weekend. Men with Brooms starred Paul Gross, who was a pretty big deal in Canada back at that time, but still, it was possible to make a curling movie and get audiences excited to see it. Even with Mickey Rourke and Justin Chatwin in relatively major roles, I don’t think audiences are looking to seeing this. The filmmakers made their movie as if it was a big joke. Underdog sports movies work a lot better when there is a sense of truth or honesty to it, there is none here; no part of this movie even comes close to resembling any part of reality. Even the janitors at the arena: no small-town hockey or curling rink has a whole team of janitors on staff, they will have one guy. But you can’t make a curling team out of one guy.
This movie is definitely not for people who curl or watch curling. It may however be for people who watch curling exactly once every four years when the winter Olympics are on. Speaking of which, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Roaring Game was released the day before curling began at the Milan Olympics. Personally I think you should just watch that or Men with Brooms instead.
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