- Title: Mystery, Alaska
- IMDb: link
Flashback Friday takes us back to 1999 for an unlikely hockey game in Mystery, Alaska. You typical underdog sports movie with various dramatic threads running through it, the film from director Jay Roach and writers David E. Kelley and Sean O’Byrne involves a former local (Hank Azaria) of the town obsessed with hockey getting them some publicity, and making a tidy profit at the same time, by arranging a hockey game between the locals and the New York Rangers.
About a half-step up above a made-for-TV movie, Mystery, Alaska is the the definition of perfectly fine in a way that won’t offer you strong opinions one way or another about what happens on-screen. Its charms come more from its cast than its plot with Russell Crowe as an older player aging out of the weekly game, Mary McCormack as his wife who dated Azaria’s character in high school, Burt Reynolds as the crotchety old judge, Colm Meaney as the town mayor, and Maury Chaykin as the local lawyer who literally gives his life to see the game come to fruition.
The players themselves include Crowe, Ryan Northcott as the young hotshot who takes his place on the team, Michael Buie, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes as the judge’s son, Leroy Peltier, Adam Beach, and Ron Eldard as the town’s mimbo sleeping his way through the town including the mayor’s wife (Lolita Davidovich). While Crowe’s part is the most notable, the movie attempts to give some of their other players their own subplots, such as the tension between the judge and his son, with mixed success.
The film was both a critical and commercial failure but has found some love over the years on home video and streaming. While it can be found on various streaming platforms, the film has notably never been released on Blu-ray Unapologetically cheesy (it is a Disney movie, after all) with a myriad of subplots and character beats that don’t all work, Mystery, Alaska can still entertain at times as nothing more or less than your typical underdog sports story of a plucky little town showing off its passion for hockey by taking on the big, bad team from the NHL that doesn’t think they are worth the time or the publicity such an event would create.
Watch the trailer
