Good hockey movies are hard to make. An actor in a hockey movie has to be a double threat — can they skate and can they act? Can the film capture the same stakes on and off the ice? The hard-checking, tough game of hockey, though, provides a useful template for a sports story. Every game is a pressure cooker full of grace, poise, and big implied action. What’s most interesting about contemporary hockey stories is who gets to play hockey. We have a popular Women’s league now. Diverse players are becoming more common, tapping into a long and storied history where they’ve always existed but have gone under promoted. So, the return of Youngblood — a classic hockey movie from the 1980s readapted to tell a new, more inclusive story — is welcome material in our new era of Heated Rivalry populism, where hockey is for everyone, and so are the sports stories we get to tell on the ice.
Like the original, the new Youngblood does a serviceable job at capturing the frenetic, gliding pace of hockey in-action. It’s shot decently enough and is helmed by Hupert Davis who made the necessary 2022 documentary Black Ice, about the long history of Black Ice Hockey, which goes back more than a hundred years when there were all-Black leagues, and examines why the social assumption that hockey is a White sport is wrong-headed, and not supported by the legible history of the sport.
The hope might be that the meta-text of that documentary, then, would seep its way into Davis’ reimagining of Youngblood. The new movie does take the baton but doesn’t skate very far with it, lensing instead an examination of Black Masculinity, which leans more heavily on the exterior lives of its characters, rather than interrogating the inner-motives that would fill the new movie with deep meaning beyond what it is already pre-installed from the 1980s.
The general arc of the story stays much the same. A young up-and-coming hockey player proves his way on and off the ice, deals with familial expectations, and relationships, but what of his inner-psyche? The film has a golden opportunity to investigate the psychology of Youngblood, as he maneuvers his way through toxicity on his path to the National Hockey League draft.
What remains is a steady-handed examination of the subject matter, which plays like going through preliminary drills, checking off a list of tropes as it goes. Dean Youngblood, played by Ashton James, is hard to root for. As the love interest in the movie puts it, he’s worked so hard for his shot at hockey, getting angry because he’s acting too aggressively, will not solve for the problem at hand, or make him easy to empathize with for an audience. Due to the film’s medium-stakes conventionality and common approach, it never gets much deeper than expressing its themes outright and literally, despite the director’s clear and loving relationship to hockey and the Black men who play it.
Youngblood never quite matches the caliber of the original material. Because it falls short on specificity and unique insights, it’s hard to latch on to any one thing it does better. While it’s shot cleanly and goes down as expected, Youngblood is held as a middle draft pick, on the verge of getting into important topics around hockey, but never quite landing on what it wants to say, or a new way of saying what’s already been said.