There must be something about Vancouver’s Agrodome and jingoistic Cold War flicks. The little old arena at Hastings Park played a Moscow stadium in Rocky IV, the unforgettably bad one where Stallone takes on the Russian superman, and wins. Now, the Agrodome plays Lake Placid’s Olympic Arena in 1980, where a ragtag band of college kids from New England and Minnesota stunned the world by defeating the powerhouse Soviet hockey club and won the gold medal.

Miracle was produced by Disney and shot here in Hollywood North. I figured it was worth checking out, if not for the predictable cheesiness and one-dimensional characters, then to see how this Mighty Ducks for slightly more grown-ups mixed pucks and politics. In 1980, after a turbulent decade that included Watergate, their defeat in Vietnam, two oil crises and revolutions against pro-U.S. regimes in Nicaragua and Iran, our southern neighbours turned to the ice for an unexpected boost to national pride.

The picture is equal parts old fashioned U.S. flag-waving, Disney feel-good sports movie -- by now a familiar recipe, indeed -- and star vehicle for an ageing Kurt Russell, who, in a rare occurrence, looks older than the role he’s playing. Russell plays the late American coach Herb Brooks, who was killed in a car accident just after Miracle finished production. Brooks is depicted as the prototypical surly, workaholic, and obsessive disciplinarian. Russell employs a permanent expression of clenched-jowled determination to communicate the coach’s unquenchable drive. When, one wonders, will Hollywood make a film about a coach who skips out early, can’t be bothered to watch hours of game film, prefers playing with his children, and making love to his wife to joylessly obsessing over his relatively uncomplicated job?

The Communist bogeyman has receded in the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it’s not surprising that the Russians are portrayed as something less than Evil incarnate. It’s true that the Slavs are depicted as utterly humourless and that Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov’s Breznevian eye brows are comically exaggerated, but absent are the requisite off-ice displays of heartlessness and on-ice dirty tactics that we might have expected. In fact, the emphasis is actually on Brooks’ admiration for the Russians' skill, and at one point the coach even laments his anti-Communist fan mail, wishing it could “just be about the game.”

The movie’s hockey sequences, which are quite extensive, are respectable in terms of the level of play, but disappointing in terms of historical accuracy. This is supposed to be America in 1980, after all, and there was a distinct lack of plaid, afros, and handle-bar moustaches in the crowd. In one shot, an extra is clearly seen to be wearing a Taiga jacket, a trademark of Vancouver circa 1990s or later.

As one who obsessed over hockey as a child, a couple of other slip-ups were obvious and annoying. For instance, two of the greatest Russian players of all time, superstar Valery Kharlamov (the victim of Bobby Clarke’s patriotic ankle-breaking cheap shot in the Canada-Soviet 1972 Summit Series) and Sergei Makarov, the Russian Wayne Gretzky of the 1980s who later played a decade in the NHL, are both wrongly depicted as right-handed shots. The Soviets’ top players, especially the forwards, were almost exclusively left-handed shooters. (I have no idea whether there is an ideological explanation for this or not.) There is also a disproportionate amount of slap shots taken by the movie’s “Russians.” But asking Disney to recreate the unique puck-control Soviet style of play is clearly asking a bit too much.

The hyper-masculinity of the hockey world is of course Disneyed-down for this G-rated family special: nobody swears or even talks about sex, the height of unreality. Russell’s lead character shows lust only for Olympic glory; the most his self-sacrificing wife gets is a sisterly peck on the cheek. One suspects that the reality of the long suffering hockey wife is much worse than this film’s depiction. Phil Esposito, one of Canada’s stars from the ‘72 series, in his recently released autobiography Thunder and Lightning, provides full disclosure on the philandering, carousing ways of the professional hockey player. Eighteen ‘til I die, indeed.

Of course, the American heroes of 1980 were amateurs, college kids with an average age of 21. Their defeat of the Soviets does mark one of the great upsets in sports history. It’s disappointing that the film doesn’t let us in to find out more about any of the players.

Jim Craig, the goalie whose heroics made victory possible, seems a potentially compelling character, but we hardly get any insight. Craig went on to a brief and unsuccessful career in the NHL; it seems his cockiness in the wake of the Olympic triumph couldn’t help him stop a puck in the big leagues. The film doesn’t follow the players outside of the locker room, who, with the exception of an initial scrap to settle an old score, appear as a homogeneous formation of earnest overachievers. Instead, we are treated to scene after scene of Brooks alone, or interacting with his spineless assistant Craig Patrick or his loyal wife.

Of course the players, and their remarkable athletic achievement in the face of such long odds, are but a thinly veiled pretext for serving up some feel good family fare, where the good guys wave the stars and stripes. I lost count of the number of scenes where that simple, three-letter chant reached a crescendo: “U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!” Bogged down in Iraq, and resented for their heavy-handed and explicit attempt to forge ahead with the American Empire, it’s important to keep that familiar chant running through our heads in such positive contexts. From Walt’s early flirtations with fascism right up to 2004, Disney has always understood the importance of whipping up a little patriotism.

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