By John Corrado
Director, writer, and star Cody Lightning (Hey, Viktor!) draws from the well of the underdog sports movie for his second feature Smudge the Blades, an enjoyable homegrown hockey movie centred around the Treaty 6 Blades, an Indigenous U-18 hockey team in Northern Alberta.
The film opens with a fight breaking out on the ice that leads to their team getting kicked out of the league, and their gruff coach Bud Bradshaw (Ed Helms) quitting. Enter Willie Gladue (Lightning), the down-on-his-luck Zamboni driver at the local rink who supplements his income taking cans from the recycling bin, and volunteers to take over coaching the team. Willie has his own ulterior motive for stepping up to help; he wants to get closer to Chanelle (Jana Schmeiding), the single mom of Taran (Isaiah Kakepetum), one of the league’s promising young players.
Lightning finds a fresh angle to the underdog sports movie formula by setting his film within an Indigenous community, and it’s enjoyable as a homegrown hockey drama. The film has a cultural specificity to it in how it captures every day life for these kids and their families on a reserve outside Edmonton, drawing characterizations out of the hopes and dreams of the young players, and what playing hockey means to them.
If Lightning’s film hits a lot of the cliched sports movie beats, they are presented in a satisfying and fun way, with the Indigenous cultural specificity adding a fresh angle. The fast-paced editing during the hockey scenes lends them a scrappy credibility, as does the cinematography by Liam Mitchell.
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