Red Army

“I’m busy,” quips Sla­va Feti­sov, defense­man, Sovi­et sport­ing leg­end and the sub­ject of Gabe Polsky’s Red Army. He stares at his phone, lost in his emails (or per­haps tak­ing a sub­tle self­ie?). Fetisov’s ungain­ly atti­tude does noth­ing to undo tired stereo­types of Russ­ian sever­i­ty, his unshowy indif­fer­ence play­ing into his vet­er­an sta­tus. Feti­sov pro­ceeds by giv­ing his inter­view­er (Pol­sky) the fin­ger. Yet, there is a mag­net­ism in his sto­ry­telling as he and his for­mer team­mates race through per­son­al mem­o­ries as play­ers in post­war Russia.

Hock­ey, the film claims, served as ​“a demon­stra­tion of Sovi­et supe­ri­or­i­ty,” cre­at­ed by Stal­in in order to dom­i­nate the West. In detail­ing the tur­moil that the tit­u­lar ​‘Red Army’ under­went, from their trau­ma­tis­ing expe­ri­ences under coach Vic­tor Tikhonov to the exhaust­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal train­ing received from pok­er-faced chess mas­ters, Pol­sky takes great pains to human­ise the unfair, Amer­i­can image of these players.

Pol­sky relies too heav­i­ly on sub­ti­tled expo­si­tion laid over gim­micky imagery of news­pa­per clip­pings, bom­bard­ing with graph­ics and facts. None of this is helped by Christophe Beck’s score (he of Frozen fame, now a go-to com­pos­er for ice-relat­ed fea­ture films), which jock­eys the film along at an uneven pace, dra­mat­i­cal­ly under-scor­ing the film’s already-unbal­anced and hyper­ac­tive­ly edit­ed emo­tion­al beats.

Moments of pathos exist with­in Polsky’s patch­work, and it’s refresh­ing to hear the prais­es of social­ism sung. Fetisov’s part­ing words empha­sis­es the impor­tance of team­mates, of doing stuff ​“col­lec­tive­ly” and being ​“proud of what team you play in.” It all feels a lit­tle too on the nose. By focus­ing less on his char­ac­ters and more on a sup­posed dark side of Russ­ian hock­ey, Polsky’s film is less doc­u­men­tary than it is didacticism.