The Rocket: The Legend of Rocket Richard

“You’re the Babe Ruth of hockey.” That’s what Dick Irvin (Stephen McHattie), coach of the Montreal Canadiens, says to Maurice Richard (Roy Dupuis), the team’s great star of the 1940s and ’50s. “The Rocket,” Charles Binamé’s 2005 film (which starts a brief theatrical run in Manhattan today), certainly gives him the kind of adoring biopic treatment sports heroes used to enjoy routinely. Mr. Binamé and the movie’s screenwriter, Ken Scott, present a Richard who has, off the ice, little in common with the boisterous Babe. He’s a faithful husband and a strong, silent hunk of blue-collar stoicism, as well as a fighter against discrimination and injustice — a combination of Jackie Robinson and the Gary Cooper version of Lou Gehrig, if you insist on a baseball analogy.
“The Rocket” is a polished, costumed production, with lots of heavy music, fedoras and trains hurtling through the wintry Quebec landscape. The film showcases Mr. Dupuis’s meaty good looks rather than his acting ability. And the story it tells, while it touches on interesting themes of class consciousness and social inequality, is pretty dull in the end. Richard marries his childhood sweetheart, Lucille (Julie Le Breton), who sits in the stands looking worried as he scores goal after goal, fights off goons and represents the proud fighting spirit of his people.
All of this is conveyed by means of a familiar melodramatic machinery, and after a while the humorless solemnity of “The Rocket” stifles any interesting sense of Maurice Richard as a character. The hockey sequences are nicely done, though, and give a reasonably good sense of what a great player he was.
Da The New York Times, 30 Novembre 2007