A tough guy with a heart of gold

Goon's main character is as endearing as he is brutal.

Given the recent and overdue attention that has been drawn to the dangers of fighting in hockey -- concussions, depression and even suicides -- I felt a bit guilty enjoying Goon, a comedy about Doug Glatt, a thug who fights his way through a career in hockey's minor-league backwaters.

Based on a true story, Goon is funny, poignant and bruising, a look at a shy brawler with a sense of decency and decorum. As played by Seann William Scott, best known for his portrayal of Stifler in the American Pie movies, Glatt comes off as a misfit who finds his calling when he learns that he can give and take a punch, a talent that seems to take him by surprise and pushes his life into a whole new sphere.

Goon inevitably will be compared to the 1977 comedy Slap Shot, but it stands on its own, and it takes Doug much more seriously than Slap Shot took its three iconic enforcers, the notorious Hansen brothers. For a movie that doesn't skimp on hockey violence, Goon also has heart, thanks mostly to a surprisingly effective performance by Scott, who plays his character straight. Glatt, a self-acknowledged dumb guy, embarrasses his staunchly middle class family, a doctor father (a convincingly serious Eugene Levy) and a doctor brother (David Paetkau), who also happens to be gay.

Watching Goon -- which is as rife with vulgar humor as with hockey fights -- I wondered if I'd underestimated Scott's abilities. He creates one of the most soulful thugs in recent screen history, a guy who you can't help but like -- for his awkwardness, his naivety and the apologetic way he goes about almost everything in his life. And to his credit: Scott never winks at the audience to let us know that he's really smarter than the character he's playing.

Doug, who plays hockey for the Halifax Highlanders, becomes a minor star in the world of minor-league hockey. Doug the Thug, as he's known, shares an apartment with Xavier Laflamme (Marc-Andre Grondin), a highly skilled hockey player who took a major hit that so unnerved him, it brought his NHL career to a end and shipped him back to the minors. Laflamme resents Glatt's rising popularity. He knows Glatt has only one skill: He can fight.

But what Lafalmme doesn't quite get is that Doug has more than a rock hard head and fists to match; he's loyal, eager to please, and genuinely wants to protect his teammates. In short, he's got character, something which Laflamme -- for all his skills -- can't match.

Perfectly cast by director Michael Drowse, Goon features some tasty small roles. Jay Baruchel plays Glatt's buddy, a fast-talking, foul-mouthed host of a ragtag hockey show called Hot Ice. And Alison Pill brings grounded credibility to the role of Eva, a hockey groupie who catches Doug's eye.

A scene between Glatt and rival thug Ross Rhea (Liev Schrieber) is as good as any I've seen this year. The two players meet by accident in a diner. The older Rhea, who's on his way out of the game, schools the up-and-coming Glatt in a scene that's smart, hard-hitting and smartly acted by Schreiber, who's close to unrecognizable as a long-haired enforcer who has spent his adult life knocking out opposing players.

Goon has enough commitment to its unglamorous milieu to keep it from becoming one more raunchy comedy. Drowse -- and his cinematographer Bobby Shore -- make the hockey scenes exciting, and they don't spare anyone's feelings when it comes to showing the brutality of the fights.

Stick around for the credits for a look at some of the fights of the real Doug Glatt, who was known as "The Hammer."

Look, I prefer hockey without fights, but as the story of a fighter with heart, Goon lands a solid punch.

The 'American Pie' gang grows long in the tooth

American Reunion suggests it's time to abandon adolescence, but still wants to wallow in the humor that goes with it..

If there's a message in the lingering adolescence of American Reunion -- the post-graduate edition of the raunchy 1999 teen comedy American Pie -- it might be this: One never is too old to masturbate. Or maybe it's that jokes involving penises and bowel movements represent the high point of hilarity. What? You thought a reunion of the American Pie crowd would result in a display of Wildean wit?

This superfluous sequel brings the Piee- gang together for a 13th high school reunion. Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are married with a two-year-old son. But all is not bliss for Jason and the former devotee of band camp: Most notably, the couple's sex life has become so dull that each prefers masturbation to intercourse.

The rest of the group can be summarized quickly. A third-tier celebrity, Oz (Chris Klein) now works as a sportscaster at a lesser cable network, but is best known for having appeared on a celebrity dance show. He lost.

Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) claims to be a worldly adventurer; Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is happily married, and Stifler (Seann William Scott) works as a temp at a high-powered investment firm, where the boss specializes in humiliation.

These former high school buddies reunite in their Michigan hometown. The guys hope the reunion will recharge batteries that have depleted since the onset of adulthood, the notion being that a weekend of rampant immaturity is just the ticket for lives that need a boost.

Directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, best known for their work on the Harold & Kumar movies, try hard to deliver the expected goods, forgoing any element of surprise for a steady and predictable stream of the same kind of ribald humor that made the previous two movies popular. If you need me to tell you more about how the Pie movies approach comedy, you definitely are not part of the movie's target audience, and don't need to know any more.

The Pie formula requires that attempts to recapture high school enthusiasms go awry, that the friends learn that it's better to be adults than to regress and that ... oh, who really cares? If you've been dying to watch Stifler engage in a gross-out act of revenge, here's your chance. Otherwise, party on elsewhere.

Sexual temptation ripples throughout the proceedings. An 18-year-old hottie (Ali Cobrin) wants to surrender her virginity to Jim. He used to babysit for her. Kevin can't help but take a second look at his old high school flame (Tara Reid), and Chris wonders whether his love for Heather (Mena Suvari) still smolders.

Despite a receding hairline, Stifler serves as the movie's vulgar centerpiece while the rest of the crew struggles to put over jokes, a somewhat laborious effort because they're all looking a little long in the tooth for this sort of adolescent romp.

Eugene Levy, a master comic actor, has the only reliably funny bits in the movie. Levy, who at one point smokes pot with Stiffler's buxom mom (Jennifer Coolidge), can fit into this kind of raunchfest and emerge with his honor intact.

American Reunion opens without serious competition in the comedy department, so it might make small splash at the box office, but I can't say that this third and belated helping of the series (American Pie 2 was released in 2001) did anything more than convince me that I've had enough.

A comedy that cops out on laughs

Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis are not funny together.

Before I persuaded myself - coerced might be a better word - to write about the new comedy Cop Out, I watched a bunch of Tracy Morgan clips on You Tube. I'd already heard Morgan being interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR, and I'd read an on-line excerpt from the comic's autobiography, I Am the New Black.

I do not consider myself an expert on all things Tracy Morgan, who stars with Bruce Willis in Cop Out. I'd seen only glimpses of Morgan during his stint on Saturday Night Live, a show I gave up on years ago, and I'm not a regular viewer of 30 Rock, either. But what interested me most about Morgan was his unpredictability.

In almost every televised interview, Morgan managed to catch the interviewer off guard, to twist a question to his advantage; i.e., to turn it into a potentially explosive piece of comedy. He'd strip off his shirt and show his generous belly while simultaneously presenting himself as a babe magnet, a Lothario from the hood. He seemed to suggest that something might go terribly wrong, and the interviewer would be unable to control it.

OK, by now you're wondering why I'm rattling on about Morgan and haven't said much about Cop Out, which was directed by Kevin Smith of Clerks, Clerks II, Mall Rats, Dogma, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and other comedies that have won their share of ardent supporters. I'm procrastinating because Cop Out is a colossal disappointment, a formulaic junk yard of a movie that may have been intended as a send-up of every comedy in which a serious white cop (that would be Willis) teams up with a funny black cop (that would be Morgan). Cop Out isn't 48 Hrs. Hell, it's not sharp enough to be called 48 Minutes.

This failure results, at least in part, from a misuse of Morgan. He plays a jealous Brooklyn-based detective who thinks his beautiful wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him. Morgan's Paul Hodges reenacts bits from movies, sometimes slobbers on himself and generally plays the oaf to Willis' Jimmy Monroe. By way of contrast, Monroe is a hard-edged cop who's divorced and worrying about how he's going to pay for his daughter's upcoming wedding, a lavish affair with a whopping $48,000 price tag.

Here's where the plot enters, and it's anything but a welcome arrival. In order to pay for the wedding, Willis decides to sell his mint condition Andy Pafko baseball card. Pafko played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 and 1952. He was in left field when Bobby Thomson's famous home run sailed into the stands, sending the Giants to the World Series and returning the Dodgers to bumhood.

Through a series of awkward contrivances, the baseball card winds up in the hands of a brutal Mexican drug lord named Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz). Po Boy also happens to collect his own memorabilia, much of it from Mexican baseball. I wish the movie had stopped in its tracks to talk about Poh Boy's collection, but Smith - who's working form a script credited to Mark and Robb Cullin - chooses to insert action into the proceedings.

This leads to another miscalculation. The action - gunplay, car chases, etc. - doesn't mesh well with the comedy, a common problem in this sort of effort. Smith also messes up some of the sight gags. In an intentionally ridiculous attempt to disguise himself, Morgan's character appears in a cell phone costume. You've probably seen it in the movie's trailer, where it wasn't all that funny. On screen, the joke may be even less amusing, extending far beyond its breaking point.

To spice things up, Smith introduces a character played by Seann William Scott, still best known for his work as Stifler in the American Pie movies. Scott plays a thief whose real job is to push the plot along and provide repetitive gags in which he displays a couple of unashamedly juvenile ploys. Say this, though, Scott brings a bit of life to proceedings that sometimes feel weighed down by the deadening shtick that dominates the relationship between Willis and Morgan.

Safe to say that Willis breaks no new ground in Cop Out. I'm no Willis basher. I believe that the guy has real acting chops. Here, though, he relies on the ease with which he commands the camera and a reputation built in a vast library of action movies that saw him tempering violence with irony. The action hero as hipster.

There's more profanity than imagination on display in Cop Out, which doesn't maximize the talents of anyone involved. If this is supposed to be an affectionate, gory and amusing tribute to similar movies, it doesn't work. That would have been a job for a genre freak such as Quentin Tarantino or possibly for Keenen Ivory Wayans (Scary Movie and I'm Gonna Git You Sucka), a comedian who knows something about straight-ahead movie parody.

In Smith's hands, Cop Out resembles a song sung by someone who's tone deaf. The result: More pain than pleasure.