The NC-17 rating was invented to protect children from movies like “Henry and June.” Couldn’t we get another rating to protect adults from movies like “D2: The Mighty Ducks”?
1992’s “The Mighty Ducks,” an uninspired clone of “The Bad News Bears” and all its knockoffs, set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, was a bad movie that hit it big. Despite star Emilio Estevez and the usual bang-up, beat-the-odds sports movie climax, it was a pretty empty show. It was obvious, hackneyed, sentimental, raucous, manipulative, and about as humorous and sincere as a soft drink commercial-which it sometimes resembled.
Audiences seemed to love it anyway. And that first movie looks like a masterpiece next to this one, a sequel that does almost everything that gives sequels a bad name. “D2”, like the “Rocky” sequels, just repeats the first movie all over again, with more money and gaudier fantasies.
Now the Ducks aren’t conquerors of Minneapolis Pee Wee Hockey. They’ve become Team USA, America’s representatives in the Junior Goodwill Games, battling squads from the likes of Russia, Germany and Italy. And their interracial, sexually integrated ranks have been swelled by new members, recruited cross-country, from Dallas to L.A. to Bangor, Maine.
In the first movie, Estevez’ Gordon Bombay was a yuppie redeemed, an unscrupulous win-at-all-costs attorney who was humanized by his contact with his feisty misfit team and went off at the end to start a professional ice hockey career.
In “D2,” original scenarist Steven Brill, with typical sequel cunning, figures out a way to cut short Gordon’s hockey career (an injury), get him back to Minneapolis (homesickness, I guess) and reunite him with the Ducks (they all get a corporate sponsor). He also introduces a new wise old paterfamilias (Jan Rubes) after the loss of the old one (Joss Ackland). He turns Gordon back into a self-absorbed yuppie and, finally, redeems Gordon and the Ducks in a new come-from-behind climax.
In the 1980s, the Ducks probably would have been skating against a USSR team at the climax. But the Russians are temporarily unavailable, and the cliche international villains in today’s movies-Arab terrorists-won’t do for a movie about ice hockey. (Not even the studio that brought us the Jamaican bobsledders in “Cool Runnings” could have pulled off an Iraqui or Iranian ice hockey team.)
Yet the movie’s choice of a new villain country, Iceland, is so out-of-left-field that you’re not even surprised when these Scandinavian bullies wind up having Swedish names-or when their sadist coach, “Wolf” (played by Carsten Norgard, a Dane) is revealed as a psychopath, banned from the NHL after a strange one-year career, for dirty play.
Nor are you surprised when hockey great Wayne Gretzky and basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar show up and smile vacantly, like stars at a supermarket opening. Or when a South Central L.A. kid teaches Team USA playground-style rap hockey and demonstrates his “knuckle puck”: a shot that flutters like a Phil Niekro knuckleball. You’re not even surprised when Team USA changes back into its Ducks uniforms in the middle of the last game. Or when Gordon Bombay shows up late for the championships, starts quacking loudly, and then gives a stirring speech about America.
By that time, you probably wouldn’t be shocked if Gordon decided to go with a team of actual Ducks-including Donald and Daffy (an ending I would have preferred).
To be honest, the repeat “big game” climax here has the same crude, pile-it-on effectiveness it did the first time. “D2” has a new director, Sam Weisman, along with its new Ducks and old cliches. He’s not as flashy as Stephen Herek was, but why should he be? This is the kind of movie that succeeds not on quality, but on noise.
”D2: THE MIGHTY DUCKS”
(STAR) 1/2
Directed by Sam Weisman; written by Steven Brill; photographed by Mark Irwin; production designed by Gary Frutkoff; edited by Eric Sears and John F. Link; music by J.A.C. Redford; produced by Jordan Kerner and Jon Avnet. A Walt Disney Pictures release; opens Friday at Water Tower, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:47. MPAA rating: PG. Comic violence.
THE CAST
Gordon Bombay………………………………..Emilio Estevez
Michele……………………………………….Kathryn Erbe
Tibbles……………………………………..Michael Tucker
Jan……………………………………………..Jan Rubes
