Bon Cop Bad Cop: Action, Comedy, and Hockey all in one

What's the best hockey movie of all time?

That seems to be the great debate among hockey fans - along with best team, best player, and whatnot.

The movies that usually top the list include "Slap Shot"..."Miracle"...perhaps "The Rocket"....never "The Mighty Ducks"....

Those are all good choices, but I'd like to add another movie: Bon Cop Bad Cop, the highest grossing Canadian film in history and one of my favourite movies of all time.

I like to think of it as "Lethal Weapon" - because it's a funny action flick - centered around hockey.

Bon Cop Bad Cop features Colm Feore (Henry Taylor from "24") as Martin Ward, the stereotypical uptight, straight-laced English detective from Ontario, and Patrick Huard (a prominent actor in Quebec who also wrote the script for Bon Cop Bad Cop) as David Bouchard, the stereotypical bad boy Quebecois detective who doesn't follow the rules.

The paths of Ward and Bouchard meet when they are forced to be partners on a case in which members of the hockey community are being murdered. It really is a clash of cultures as each has to deal with the habits and methods of the other. The film is completely bilingual, with the characters switching from English to French and back, sometimes in the same sentence, but subtitles fix those problems.

One of the things I love about this movie is that the hockey story basically parallels the NHL, with names of key players being changed - but just barely.

We see the LHC's Toronto Loyalists playing the Montreal Patriotes for the Holt Cup.

Rick Mercer plays 'Tom Berry', the loud-mouthed hockey commentator with ugly shirts and ties who cannot stand French Canadians.

And then there's 'Harry Buttman', the vertically challenged commissioner who wants to let (another) Canadian team move to the Southern belt - Houston, specifically.

They talk about how Grossbut moved the Quebec to Colorado....and then won the Cup (the guy's name in real life was 'Aubut').

And how Martina Flabcheeks was the agent of a certain number 1 draft pick of Quebec, and how she wanted him to play for Toronto, but "#88" ended up in Philadelphia without playing a single game in Quebec and now has concussion issues.

Who could forget about Pickleton (err...Pocklington), the one who sold the greatest player in the world to Los Angeles? Number 99?

I don't know, maybe it doesn't take a genius to weave key NHL characters into this script, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable movie.

After all, who doesn't like a good movie with action, comedy, and a hockey story? Plus, it doesn't hurt that this movie isn't your typical cheap Canadian movie.

Here are a few scenes from the movie:

Border Relations:


The "Tom Berry" Show: