Crooked Arrows

If you’ve been following the story of the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team (and if you haven’t, you really should start) you know it’s the kind of thing that would make a great sports movie. Sadly, Crooked Arrows isn’t that movie. True, it’s about the triumph of an underdog Native American lacrosse team, but the parallels end there. The Arrows are a high school team, not the Nationals. And more importantly, Crooked Arrows is a long ways from a great sports movie.

The film is set on the fictional Sunnuquot Reservation in upstate New York. According to the press release, the Sunnuquot are supposed to be the “seventh nation” in the Iroquois confederacy. This might be the first hint that director Steve Rash—whose last film was the direct-to-DVD American Pie Presents Band Camp—isn’t all that interested in the Native American setting of this film.

The Onandaga Nation helped finance this film, and they have a long and thriving lacrosse tradition. In fact, several of the actors in Crooked Arrows are members of the Onandaga lacrosse team.

So why not set it in a real place? Because if you create a fictional tribe, you can cherry pick whatever Native American cultural bits and pieces you want and not offend anybody. Or perhaps offend everybody with your generic, condescending and overly simplistic ideas about what it means to be Native in the 21st century.

Brandon Routh, who says he’s part Kickapoo, stars as the prodigal son of the Sunnuquots, who once played lacrosse for the neighboring rich white kid prep school, and then headed into the city to make his fortune by selling his tribal lands to casino developers. But before the tribal council will let him hand over any more of the tribe’s ancestral birthright, he must spend a season coaching the high school lacrosse team, that hasn’t won a game for as long as anyone can remember. In so doing, he will recover his Indian spirit, or something like that.

And so we’ve got a reluctant coach forced to lead a group of losers—the standard setup of every underdog sports movie ever made, from Bad News Bears to A League of Their Own to The Mighty Ducks. Add Native American cliches and stir. There’s an assistant coach/medicine man who makes them magic lacrosse sticks, and talks like a cross between Yoda and Tonto. Routh takes the players on a vision quest where they receive their animal spirits—and their lacrosse positions. They’re short a goalie, until a seven-foot wild man named MOG who slays deer with his bare hands and eats them raw steps out of the woods and occupies the crease. It goes on and on like this.

You can get angry about all the terrible stereotypes, or you can treat it like a bad horror flick from the ‘70s and laugh at how terrible and ridiculous it all is. That’s what I recommend.

Like a broken clock, Crooked Arrows occasionally gets things right. Every now and then, Routh’s struggle to live in two worlds actually rings true. And Chelsea Ricketts plays Routh’s feisty little sister, who cares far more about lacrosse than her brother does. Her performance is head and shoulders above everyone else’s in this one. She’s the only actor who seems genuinely committed to the material.

Gil Birmingham, a fine Native actor, plays Routh’s father half-heartedly; perhaps he knows what an embarrassment this movie is, but hey, an actor’s got to work just like anyone else.

In its second half, when it gets away from offensive stereotypes and focuses on the sport, Crooked Arrows becomes a better movie. It is still slavishly addicted the sports’ movie clichés—the bench warmer, the ringer, the vicious opposing coach, the injured star—but the action scenes are crisp, colorful, and pretty exciting to watch.

The team, under new management, recovers from an 0-5 start to make the playoffs by a whisker. But to win the championship, they must defeat the prep school boys from down the highway, who have embarrassed them on the field time and again. (“When did the Indians learn to play lacrosse?” one suburban mom whispers to another on the sidelines). Routh’s halftime speech is one of the best moments in the film, and you just might find a tear in your eye—if you’re still watching after all the nonsense that came in the first half of the film.

It’s great to see lacrosse, and its Native American roots, get some exposure on the big screen. But this isn’t the film I had hoped it would be. I still think the story of the Iroquois Nationals would make a great movie. Maybe this one will open the door for that one to be made. Lacrosse and the Six Nations people who invented the game, deserve better.

Willie Krischke lives in Durango, Colorado and works for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship with Native American students at Fort Lewis College. To read more of his reviews, go to http://www.gonnawatchit.com