Goon (15) **

Goon (15) **

Dir:Michael Dowse

Starring:Sean William Scott, Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill

Synopsis:After his family reject him for being less intelligent than them, Doug Glatt uses his talent for taking and delivering abuse to take an underperforming hockey team up through the league.

Verdict:All at once, Goon is and isn’t a typical William Scott style film. Where we are used to seeing him playing a loud and obnoxious character, substitute this with the quiet, yet violent, Glatt - a bouncer turned hockey player. Well, hockey player is a loose term. He plays the player who exists primarily to get into fights in the surprisingly violent game of ice hockey.

The film is quite a good move for Scott, as it shows that he can indeed play something other than the Stifler-esque role he is known for. At times he can be quite sweet in his ‘simpleton’ way, especially in his courtship of Eva (Pill) and then he destroys that by taking beatings that should render him unconscious, and then beat seven shades out of the other guy.

The humour is typical of the genre, focusing on slapstick, sex jokes and blue language to get simple laughs. In some ways, it reminded me of Happy Gilmore with its humour and plot, just a bit less subtle. But that could just be me.

This said, the story moves quite slowly and, despite a good deliverance by William Scott, I didn’t find myself connecting with the character as well as I probably should. This, coupled the re-use of the same jokes from countless other comedies, means that the film didn’t quite get to my funny bone or touch me in the way it should have either.