Young adults of a certain age are obsessed with “The Mighty Ducks”; I’m 24 years old and it’s one of my earliest movie memories. Coach Bombay, he was so conflicted! And his team, they weren’t precise, but they had so much heart! Those evil Hawks! The flying V formation! A young Joshua Jackson, before he was so scandalous on that WB teen soap opera “Dawson’s Creek”! I could recite most of the entire movie to you, because it’s every ’90s kid’s favorite sports movie. That, and “Space Jam.”
So “Crooked Arrows” works mainly because it takes that very specific plot formula and tweaks it a bit to its specifications. Director Steve Rash and writers Todd Baird and Brad Riddell swap Coach Bombay for Joe Logan (Brandon Routh, of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”), a mixed-blood Native American and former star lacrosse player who now runs a casino on his family’s ancestral land. Rich from selling their property, Logan wants to claim more land for his developer boss, but before he gets approval from the tribal council, must undergo a spiritual quest to rediscover his heritage.
And that journey, as dictated by his father Ben (Gil Birmingham, from “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” and “Rango”), will be focused on coaching his reservation’s high school lacrosse team, a bunch of undisciplined teen boys who can’t stop losing. Although their assistant coach is Joe’s little sister Nadie (Chelsea Ricketts), who can recite offensive plays like it’s her job, the teammates are lacking something. They were handed lacrosse sticks at birth, but precision and full-on dedication elude them.
Jimmy, or Silverfoot (Tyler Hill, a member of Mohawk Nation), is a great player, but a ball-hog who doesn’t know to create plays for his peers. Chewy (Cree Cathers, a member of Mohawk Nation) can’t figure out how to use his large size to the team’s benefit. Goalie Reed (Michael Hudson, a member of Mohawk Nation) is too worried about messing up his good looks to be aggressively defensive. Every player has something holding them back, and when they find out community pariah Joe is going to be their coach, they’re not exactly thrilled. And neither is schoolteacher Dr. Julie Gifford (Crystal Allen), Joe’s ex-girlfriend from high school who became more enamored with his people than with him.
But the underdog has to triumph, and so Joe begins to realize that to fully find himself, he needs to help these kids develop their talents. He stops checking his phone during games and starts showing up to practice in athletic gear, not suits (the movie was sponsored by Reebok, hence all the product placement). He bests the team’s goalie to prove his skills. He makes them sprint up mountains. He helps them understand their spirit animals. And he coaxes a giant-sized teen, Maug (Aaron Printup, a member of Tuscarora Nation), out of the forest and into the team. Everyone else had just thought the kid was Sasquatch.
It all builds up to a game against Coventry Academy, an elite prep school which Joe attended—forcing the coach to simultaneously face his past while also determining his own future. Plus, slow-motion game sequences! They’re the best kind.
To be clear, “Crooked Arrows” is not a great movie. Routh is an acceptable actor, but he’s not necessarily the most natural. There’s a stiffness to him, and to Ricketts, that lasts the entire film; neither is as effectively soothing as Birmingham. The Coventry Academy players and coaches are all caricatures of movie bad guys. And the frequent transitions from modern game scenes to ones featuring Native Americans playing the “Creator’s game” during 1200 A.D. become overdone, fast.
But ultimately “Crooked Arrows” is a film with its heart in the right place: It gives a nice history of lacrosse, provides agency to the Native American community, and handles its redemptive conclusion effectively. “Crooked Arrows” won’t change the sports movie genre forever, but it’s a good starting point for lacrosse, and a solid introduction to promising young actors like Hill and Printup. The dialogue is sometimes undeniably clunky—especially when one lacrosse fan notes that a crowd had “gone totally native”—but “Crooked Arrows” means well. At the end, you may even be tempted to break into triumphant quacks, “Mighty Ducks” style. There would be nothing wrong with that.
