Legenda 17

I’ve hated this football team my entire life and suddenly, I’m supposed to celebrate it? But okay, I believe that the Russians truly do celebrate it, as much as I believe they’re this patriotic. And don’t even get me started on the pathos in this movie… But there’s no doubt it’s high-quality cinematography. (24.04.2018)

About the legendary no. 17, as it seems it would be from the introduction? About one of the most contradictory and most idiosyncratic trainer/dictator in the history of ice hockey, in an excellent performance from Menshikov? A fairytale about the Soviet team and their year of triumph; in other words, the legendary “Cold War on Ice" series which, together with victory at the subsequent European Championship, crushed the Canadian maple leave once and for all? It’s a cross between all of the above, but not one of the themes leads to any conclusion. The most interesting aspects of Kharlamov’s fate were surprisingly ignored and the fairytale finishes with the first match. It seems more like an attempt to get the domestic audience hyped about Sochi. Overall it is tailored to the Russian viewer and so it is overflowing with naive Russian “chest-beating" ostentation so familiar from Soviet war movies. If you find it too hard to swallow, it changes into an unintentional, self-parodying affair, but if you withstand it, you are in for a solid genre picture where everything is polished black or white (and if not, they don’t show it) and which isn’t enough to just pay homage to, but rather demands to be placed high up on a divine pedestal. P.S.: When we make a movie about Jágr, I hope we borrow the scene with the cooling towers; I can see it now. Jágr in personal and professional crisis traverses hand over hand on a rope strung between the two steelworks chimneys in Kladno, thinking about really profound problems and comes down a far more ambitious player, several levels higher than before. (01.12.2013)