When
true love breaks the ice.
1992 – 101 minutes
D.B. Sweeney (Eight Men Out, Memphis Belle) and Moira
Kelly (Billy Bathgate) star in the entertaining love story set in the rink.
Sweeney is a handsome, self-centered ex-ice hockey player whose
professional career is cut short when he is injured; Kelly is a champion figure
skater whose prima donna attitude has sent every prospective partner running.
To each other, they represent a last resort for their prospective careers
in the rink: he could be the partner she needs to win the Olympic God Medal, she
could be his only chance of any kind of career in the rink.
Can these two mismatched skaters find a common ground….or are they
skating on thin ice? With a supporting cast that includes Roy Dotrice (Amadeus,
“The Equalizer”) and Terry O’Quinn (The Stepfather, The Rocketeer) and
featuring an exciting soundtrack and fast-paced direction by Paul M. Glaser (The
Running Man, Band of the Hand), The Cutting Edge will keep you on the edge of
your seat as the action and romance explode on the screen.
A
calculated throwback to old-fashioned romances, THE CUTTING EDGE could be used
as a classroom example of correct, if not necessarily compelling, screenwriting
technique. It sets up its situation, in which antagonistic characters are thrown
together and fall in love, and plays it out to logical perfection.
Doug Dorsey (D.B.
Sweeney) is a working-class kid with a gift for playing hockey; he looks as
though he's headed for a major career until a minor but irreparable eye injury
sidelines him. Kate Moseley (Moira Kelly) is a spoiled rich girl whose bid for
Olympic figure skating fame is defeated by her nasty temperament. She's such a
bitch no one can stand her, and all her daddy's (Terry O'Quinn) money can't
change that. Crafty old Russian coach Anton Pamchenko (Roy Dotrice) pairs the
two, and soon they're bickering by day and conspicuously ignoring one another by
night. Doug has to relearn skating (he thinks figure skating is such a sissy
business that he tells his friends back home that he's shipped out with the
merchant marines), and Kate needs to accept that yes, she can learn something
from somebody else. They form an inspired partnership (he gives her sex and she
gives him class, to invert the old Astaire/Rogers formula) and progress to the
Olympic tryouts. Along the way they fall in love, though at first they both do
their best to deny it. In an improbable but perfectly predictable ending, they
admit their mutual attraction moments before skating out to Olympic stardom,
sealing their declaration not with a kiss, but with a novel and difficult stunt.
Perhaps the reason
THE CUTTING EDGE seems so oddly old fashioned is that the romantic conventions
by which it plays have in recent years been usurped by the buddy movie,
exemplified by the wildly successful LETHAL WEAPON series. At least where
American films are concerned, today's viewers seem to expect their
opposites-attract couples to be of the same sex variety, and (in mainstream
movies, anyway) expect them not to end up in bed together. They just learn
tolerance, acceptance and understanding as chaste friendship blossoms. That's
not to say you don't have mismatched couples falling for one another in
contemporary movies, just that their affairs are seldom the focal point. It's as
though today's moviemakers have lost faith in romance, pure and simple, as a
subject. Even THE BIG EASY, a longstanding favorite of contemporary romantics,
tries to insure that audiences won't get bored by surrounding its love affair
with a murder mystery and lashings of New Orleans atmosphere, while PRETTY
WOMAN--probably the closest thing to an old-fashioned romance movie in
years--tricks up the fairy tale story line with class comedy and yuppie angst.
Directed by Paul
Michael Glaser (formerly half of that Ur-buddy couple, TV's "Starsky and
Hutch"), THE CUTTING EDGE also seems anachronistic in its PG-rated
treatment of sex; there's scarcely more of it than you'd find in a similar film
made in the 1940s, and what there is takes place discretely off screen. The
movie's thrills are mostly of the athletic variety, and though diehard ice
skating fans were no doubt disappointed by the rapid-fire editing required to
conceal--quite effectively--the use of doubles for Kelly and Sweeny, the
ice-skating scenes are in fact well photographed and competently used to
delineate the developing relationship between the two skaters.
Clearly
designed to be a family entertainment, THE CUTTING EDGE has a by-the-numbers
quality that's only partly concealed by smooth production values and
consistent--if uninspiring--performances.
