Movie Review: 'Red Army'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Perhaps the most successful dynasty in sports history wasn't a football team or a baseball team or a basketball team.
It was a hockey team and not one in the National Hockey League.
No, it was the Red Army hockey team in the Soviet Union, and it provides the focus for the political sports documentary, Red Army, set during the Cold War, when no sport was more important to the Soviets then hockey.
Writer-director Gabe Polsky tells his story from the perspective of the team's young defenseman and captain, Vyacheslav "Slava" Fetisov, who was at first rejected by a prestigious ice hockey academy, then accepted and recruited into the army at the age of eight to be trained as an ice hockey player.
He would go on to become a national hero before becoming a political enemy of the state.
Polsky uses this sports drama/history lesson to parallel the rise and fall of the Red Army team with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, starting with the team's 1954 inception and covering the stretch between then and 1991, when the Soviet Union fell and the team disbanded.
Interspersed with dynamic archival game footage, talking-head observations and commentary, and assorted helpful graphics are candid interviews with members of the Soviet Union team. But the film is as much about the fundamental changes that the country was going through at the time as it is about the sport.
Practice was demanding and teamwork, skill, and victory demanded, with experts in chess and ballet consulted because the sport was being used propagandistically as part of an emphatic attempt to create an unstoppable juggernaut that would dominate the sport against all comers.
And if that meant recruiting children, keeping them in hockey camp eleven months a year, treating them like prisoners, and stripping them of their rights, so be it.
Then came the incomprehensible shocker: Gold for the Americans, silver for the Soviets.
Let's just say that the stunning upset that would come to be known, at least in these parts, as the "Miracle on Ice" – memorably depicted in the 2004 film, Miracle, starring Kurt Russell as triumphant hockey coach Herb Brooks -- that occurred when the surprisingly competitive rookie USA team emerged triumphant in the semi-final over the presumably unstoppable Soviet national team at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, did not go down well in the USSR.
Then, in the eighties, Fetisov started looking into the possibility of playing in the NHL. That did not go down well at home either, especially when he refused to play for the Red Army team.
And when he did finally get the chance to play in the US, he discovered that American players either didn't or couldn't necessarily play the Soviet style of hockey. And adjustment did not come easily.
But things changed when five members of the Red Army team were recruited by the NHL's Detroit Red Wings and coach Scotty Bowman had them play together, forming a line that came to be called the "Soviet Symphony." And as hockey fans know, a pair of Stanley Cups ensued.
So we'll skate past 2½ stars out of 4 for Red Army, an illuminating and nostalgic treat for fans of the sport as well as fans of the docu genre.
