**
Cast: Russell Crowe, Colm Meany, Burt Reynolds
Director: Jay Roach Rating: M (sex, offensive language).
Running time: 119 minutes
Opens: Now showing Village, Hoyts cinemas
Review: Russell Baillie
As members of the Mystery, Alaska ice hockey team study a videotape of their looming big-city, big-name opposition, they flinch at their opponents in a brutal
fight that's typical of the pro game.
"Maybe we should fast forward to the hockey bit," quips one.
If only we could, too. But no, Mystery Alaska takes itself very seriously for what you would figure could be a fun romp in sub-zero temperatures: smalltown team who plays for the love of the game takes on big boys from New York and everybody learns a lesson about what's really important in life and sports. Roll credits. Go home mildly entertained.
But this plays too much like a pilot for a television series up the road from Northern Exposure. And when you mix soap and snow and sport you get, er, cold, sweaty soap.
The ensemble cast do their best with the sort of dialogue which requires their rare jokes are punchlined, unfunnily, by expletives, these being frontiersfolk 'n all.
But none of their life-crises add much but clutter. Whether it's Crowe's sheriff who's risking being bumped from the local team and his marriage because he's slowing down, or Meany's mayor whose wife Lolita Davidovich is cheating on him with the town stud, or Reynolds' grumpy local judge who is permanently disappointed in his hockey-jock son, and so on. So many people with so many issues but frankly we don't have the time or the inclination to care.
Suppose we could always blame director Roach (whose helming of the Austin Powers movies means a cameo from Mike Myers) but this bears the trademark of its producer/co-writer David E. Kelly of Ally McBeal and The Practice fame. Which is probably why this comes with a couple of quirky, if wholly unnecessary, courtroom scenes. At least his women characters have shifted from being neurotic anorexics to an interesting blend of hypothermia and nymphomania.
Yes, it gets to the hockey showdown in the end and ra-ra for that.
But Mystery tries so tediously hard to be a drama instead of a comedy and that makes for a minor tragedy.
