7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Paul Newman stars as (Reggie 'Reg' Dunlop) the coach of the Chiefs, a struggling minor-league hockey team. To build up attendance at their games, management signs up the Hanson Brothers, three hard-charging players whose job is to demolish the opposition.
Starring: Paul Newman, Michael Ontkean, Strother Martin, Jennifer Warren, Lindsay CrouseSport | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: DTS 2.0 Mono
French: DTS 2.0 Mono
Canadian French dub
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Slap Shot was Paul Newman's favorite role and, as he often said in interviews, the most fun he ever had making a film. Reuniting with director George Roy Hill, with whom he made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), Newman led a combined cast of actors and hockey players to create one of American cinema's essential sports films. Hockey fans got it immediately, even if film critics took a while to come around. The late Gene Siskel famously wrote that one of his biggest regrets as a reviewer was failing to appreciate the brilliance of Slap Shot when it first appeared. He later ranked it as one of the greatest American comedies of all time. Hill was a natural fit to direct a film about the testosterone-saturated antics of a minor league hockey team on a losing streak, but one of Slap Shot's ironies is that the script was penned by a woman, Nancy Dowd, whose brother, Ned, played for the Johnstown Jets, the model for the film's Charlestown Chiefs. Dowd built the script from her brother's life and experiences and those of his teammates and friends, which gives even the most absurd moments in Slap Shot a grounding in reality. With Ned Dowd as a technical advisor (he also appeared in the small but memorable role of Ogie Oglethorpe) and many more real hockey players recruited for both the Chiefs and their opponents, including the so-called "Hanson Brothers (of which more below), Hill was able to capture authentic scenes of rinkside mayhem that no film has ever surpassed. The audiences of 1977 were shocked by the violence and also, in that pre-Tarantino era, by the locker-room language. Newman himself claimed that his vocabulary changed after Slap Shot, as if his foul-mouthed character had lodged somewhere permanently in his brain. Previous versions of Slap Shot on VHS, laserdisc and DVD have suffered from soft, grainy images lacking in detail. Universal's "Best of the Decade" Blu-ray edition represents a leap upward in quality and deserves a place in every fan's library.
Director George Roy Hill has long gotten the unfair rap of having no visual style, probably because he had the bad luck to make films in the era when visionaries like Scorsese, Spielberg, Ashby and Coppola were redefining the look of cinema. Still, with the help of Victor Kemper, one of the essential cinematographers of the Seventies (Dog Day Afternoon, Coma, . . .And Justice for All, to name just a few), Hill created a distinctive and appropriate visual vocabulary for Slap Shot. The urban and interior scenes have the dull, subdued, naturalistic look that instantly marks the film as a product of the Seventies. (So do the fashions worn by Newman and the other players, which were tacky even by standards of the era.) Colors are generally bland, and the image typically lacks depth. On the ice, by contrast, or in any activity directly related to the game, the image brightens with higher contrast and more saturated primary colors enter the picture, whether on team uniforms, or red-white-and-blue bunting or just the yellow of a booster bus. The image gains greater depth, and there's never any question what makes these players feel most alive. Universal's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray represents a welcome departure from the studio's frequent tendency to make its catalog titles look more like video than film. Working from well-maintained (or well-restored) source material, the studio has produced a sharply detailed transfer with a fine-grained, film-like texture that doesn't suffer from the artificial sharpening that has unnecessarily polished so many previous Universal catalog releases. Black levels and contrast look correct, and color saturation varies from the drabness of downtown Charlestown to the saturation of the Chiefs' best uniforms. You can see the film's grain pattern if you look for it, and it doesn't appear to have been stripped or reduced, just captured and gently reproduced in pixels. At an average bitrate of 31.99 Mbps, there's plenty of bandwidth to handle the players whizzing around the ice, bashing each other with everything they've got.
Slap Shot's original mono sound mix is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right front channels. As mono mixes from the era go, it's one of the better ones, with good fidelity, decent dynamic range and an energetic presence, especially during the hockey sequences, where the body blows, stick hits, punches, stomps, scrapes and other sounds of violence register with appropriate impact. The dialogue is generally clear, although some of the non-professionals tend to slur their words. No original musical scoring was created; the music is all source-derived and consists of contemporary pop tunes that have been expertly chosen for their sound and thematic content. Many of these were replaced in earlier video versions, but as far as I can tell, the original selections are all here. (If anyone notices a replacement, please contact me directly so that I can add it to the review.) Some of the notable songs are: Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word"; Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing"; and Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From".
The extras have been ported over from the "25th Anniversary Special Edition" DVD released by Universal in 2005 (by which time, it should be noted, the film was already 28 years old).
Watching Slap Shot is reportedly a favorite pastime of hockey teams on tour, but you don't have to be a hockey fan, or even a sports enthusiast, to enjoy the film's high spirits. Newman's pleasure in playing Reg Dunlop is so infectious that he draws viewers into Reg's every encounter, even when Reg has no idea what he's doing. When the hopeful coach finally does track down the mysterious team owner, he's hopelessly out of his element, but you admire him for the effort. When we last see him, he's got a whole new deal going, or at least that's what he says. He may be making it up as he goes along, but you'd love to see what he does next. Highly recommended.
2011
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1977
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25th Anniversary Edition
1986
Remastered
1976
35th Anniversary Edition
1989
2014
1973
Special Edition
1986
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