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Verdict: It will make you want to chant, "U.S.A., U.S.A.!"

By BOB LONGINO
Cox News Service

There are times when Hollywood gets sports movies right. Films like "Hoosiers," "Rudy," "Field of Dreams," "Breaking Away" and "The Natural."

With "Miracle," the story of the improbable run to the gold by the 1980 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team, Disney gets it right, too.

"Miracle" has almost all the right stuff to make it a more than worthy rah-rah movie. It'll jostle the memories of everyone who watched on TV 24 years ago as 20 American college kids at the Lake Placid Olympics mustered the kind of puck pluck needed to beat the then-unbeatable Soviet Union team and, one game later against Finland, make sports history by winning the gold medal.

"Miracle" has it all - announcer Al Michaels shouting, "Do you believe in miracles?"; team captain Mike Eruzione (Patrick O'Brien Demsey) running on his skates after scoring the go-ahead goal against the Soviets; U.S. goalie Jim Craig (Eddie Cahill) searching the crowd to find his father after the victory over Finland.

The film also has a secret weapon: Kurt Russell.

He plays U.S. coach Herb Brooks with the kind of relentless dedication and spot-on impersonation he brought 25 years ago to the title role in TV's "Elvis." Russell is as amazing as the real-life team's win. And he's paired with Patricia Clarkson (a supporting actress Oscar nominee for "Pieces of April"), who brings off-the-ice integrity to the film playing Brooks' wife.

What's often miraculous is the filmmakers' ability, especially through tight and quick film editing, to generate excitement and a genuine feeling of immediacy in sports contests with such well-known outcomes.

The cast is made up mostly of hockey players who were instructed in acting. The result is a level of physical realism usually missing in a sports film. As you'd expect, the Soviet game is a blitzkrieg of body checking, cross-checking, breakaways, face-offs and power plays.

Just like in the real-life, history-making game, it matters not whether moviegoers understand any of that. "Miracle" is a re-creation of an emotional high, girded by the physicality of the game but existing on a plain of social consciousness that far exceeds understanding hockey terminology.

Like a junior high textbook, the film lays out the depressing social conditions America faced in the late 1970s as the Olympics neared. There was Watergate and running inflation, Billy Beer and Three Mile Island, gas rationing and the Iran hostage crisis.

The film is built on textbook clichˇs - coach as unloving drillmaster, team as family, the nation wallowing in hero starvation. But each is delivered with such precision and professionalism, they become exhilarating.

"Miracle" also succeeds in making its off-ice time as important and correct in its details as the fun-to-watch games. Russell doesn't just wear the era's plaid pants and helmet hair well, he embodies Brooks as an intimacy-challenged man who is also a sly (and brilliant) motivator. His scenes with Clarkson are also revelatory, bringing to the fore the kind of loving and anger-filled marriage that feels and sounds real.

If there is a major problem, it is with composer Mark Isham's music. It never matches the film's emotional intensity and, at times, seems almost absent when it should be at its most involving.

It is also downright odd that Disney chose to make the all-American "Miracle" in Canada. But to many moviegoers, that will be quibbling.

"Miracle" has the intensity and thrill of victory to surpass many other sports films, such as "Remember the Titans." It's "Rocky" with depth, a poor man's "Raging Bull" with a heavy dose of metaphoric pom-poms.

Ultimately, it probably lands somewhere between the enticing basketball of "Hoosiers" and the emotionally charged football of "Rudy."

In other words, should you believe in "Miracle"? Well, yes.