“I play hockey and I fornicate ’cause they’re the two most fun things to do in cold weather.” That’s how a promiscuous young athlete apologizes for sleeping with another man’s wife in Mystery, Alaska, a movie that’s equal parts hockey and hormones.
When a humble pond-hockey team from the boondocks gets ink in Sports Illustrated, it leads to a high-profile exhibition game with the New York Rangers. But this Disney film is closer to Slapshot than to The Mighty Ducks. Obscenities—including a dozen inapt uses of the Lord’s name and twice as many f-words—fly like pucks into an empty net (a young child’s colorful vocabulary is exploitative, desperate and unfunny).
The movie also fishes for laughs with violence in the form of bone-crunching punches to the face, a man being shot in the foot and a womanizer having his head opened by a shovel. There’s even rear nudity, drunkenness and several graphic scenes of people vomiting. High comedy! Still, Mystery, Alaska is most offensive in its explicit depictions of sex. A woman in the throes of adulterous passion rides atop a man more interested in watching a game on TV. Later, two hot-blooded teens prepare to lose their virginity together in a snowplow (as she puts the condom on him, he can no longer contain himself). Insipid.
Young sports fans who visit Mystery, Alaska for the hockey will get high-sticked by raunchy language and reprehensible sexuality. A shameful snow job.
