Sports clichés fail to score in First Nation tale

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ALLIANCE FILMS Brandon Routh in Crooked Arrows. (POSTMEDIA)

THERE are so many scraps of other films floating through Crooked Arrows, the whole exercise feels familiar and oddly tired in the first few scenes.

That's not the best way to walk through the first act of a feature film, but thanks to an earnest message about community and the importance of honouring your own history, this cross between Smoke Signals and every Cinderella sports movie cliché finds just enough altitude to keep it inside the baseline.

It even offers up an image of something most moviegoers have never seen before: A group of First Nations men running through the forest in loin cloths, carrying long sticks with small baskets and intermittently tackling each other to take possession of a small, hard ball.

A few moments later, we learn we are witnessing "the creator's game" -- a sport that demands so much skill and physical dexterity, it pleases the gods to see it played by committed participants.

In the modern era, the "creator's game" is called lacrosse -- and while it's a known commodity in lacrosse circles, the sport is somewhat eclipsed by its many athletic cousins with a higher sponsorship profile.

This movie feels like it's trying to remedy that situation with a brand name actor in Superman star Brandon Routh, as well as an apparent tie-in with ESPN -- apparently the sole broadcaster of collegiate league lacrosse.

Routh plays Joe Logan, a kid who grew up on the "rez" with his father, Ben (Gil Birmingham), and his sister Nadie (Chelsea Ricketts).

Clearly lost and emotionally fragmented after losing his white mother, we learn Joe has prostituted himself to the blue-eyed devil of a business developer investing in the local "Lucky Indian" casino.

Trotting around the gambling floor wearing a buckskin coat and a toy bow with suction cup arrows, Joe Logan thinks he is the modern face of aboriginal culture: a businessman with short hair, a slick German sports car and a progressive sensibility.

Joe says he wants to expand the casino because it will bring in enough capital to build a much-needed hospital -- something he's been wanting ever since his mother died from an apparently treatable affliction.

The band council, however, has reservations.

They aren't entirely convinced Joe has the requisite control over the casino project, and in order to test his mettle, they assign him a spirit quest to be selected by his father.

Daddy knows just the right challenge, and it all comes down to honouring the creator's game.

Turns out Joe's tribe, the Sunaquot, is one of several First Nations to play lacrosse as a traditional pastime, but these days, their sport has been taken over by prep schools with fancy pitches and highly paid coaches.

The local kids are getting pummelled every game because they lack the focus and team skills to make them winners. They need to dig deep into their past and rediscover their aboriginal pride, which is the exact same quest now facing Joe.

Without connecting the rest of the dots, you can already see how the overall narrative will shape up once Joe is assigned the task of coaching the ragtag team.

Pulling out everything from the Rocky stair-climbing scene to the tear-jerking finale for Rudy, director Steve Rash tries to bring a cinematic as well as symbolic grandeur to lacrosse.

He succeeds on this score because the sport looks and feels a lot like hockey, and lends itself to slow-motion action shots of scoring on goal and leaping poetically into the air.

Yet, for all the pretty pictures, Crooked Arrows can't generate anything truly novel outside of the specifics of the sport and the setting.

The actors bear their narrative fate with a brave face and a patient smile, with Routh providing some sharp comic punctuation with artfully delivered sarcasm. The rest of the cast doesn't get enough dialogue to work around the hackneyed sentiments and clichéd moments, but you can tell it's not their fault.

And in the end, it's these intangible forces that rescue the movie from a puddle of propagandist impulse and leaden drama. There is something fundamentally moving about people using sport to recreate themselves, their culture or their community.

Crooked Arrows fails to finesse any of these points into an elegant form, despite a handful of big speech moments steeped in tribal wisdom, but it does wave a flag for First Nations pride as well as the sport of lacrosse -- two communities long ignored by the dominant force of popular culture.

-- Postmedia News

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Crooked Arrows.

If you can't guess where these Crooked Arrows are going, you aren't getting out enough. But Routh is wonderfully light and laid back here, perhaps thanks to the low stakes this tiny film has.

-- Roger Moore, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

An entirely predictable script that chugs along to the foregone loser-beats-odds conclusion.

-- Gayle MacDonald, Globe and Mail

In another era, Crooked Arrows might have been an after-school special, perfect to have on the TV while cleaning the house; miss a scene while you're dusting under the couch, and you'll still know exactly what's happening later.

-- Farran Smith Nehme, New York Post

The plucky underdog Native American lacrosse movie I never knew I wanted.

-- John Swansburg, Slate

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Movie Review

Crooked Arrows

Starring Brandon Routh, Gil Birmingham, Chelsea Ricketts

Globe

Subject to classification

100 minutes

Two and a half stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 6, 2012 D4