User Reviews

OK, so this was not exactly high art. But let's be realistic, it is a movie with Paul Gross and Leslie Nielson in it. I was not expecting the English patient.... What was here was a good little comedy movie that poked fun at a lot of Canadian idiosyncrasies, had realistic characters and had a bit of fun with a known Canadian (and international) sport. It was nice that most of the characters had some sort of flaw, but still managed to sort things out and overcome. Better yet, it was nice to see Leslie Nielson actually act in a movie with a character who had depth instead of his normal two dimensional slapstick characters. Mostly, I enjoyed this movie because it was not a complete cast of perfect people, and it did have fun with a lot of Canadian stereotypes. It is always good when we can laugh at ourselves. Like I said, not high art but that was not what we were looking for.

If you just want a pizza and beer movie and a few laughs with mates then this is a good choice.

Just offensive enough to feel adult, just enough comedy to make you laugh, and enough curling to remind you you're watching a sports movie.

Is it a classic? No.

But, is it a turkey? No way.

It's an unusual sports movie with lots of silliness and little one-liners and it actually does the send up of curling very well.

All in all it shines for its small town values, it's heart, and good performances.

A nice break from the norm.

Genial, intermittently amusing comedy about curling. I never knew what curling was, and it's sort of an interesting shuffleboard/billiards kind of game and I'm glad to have learned something about it, but outside of that this movie is so slight that in spite of it's easygoing charm I never felt more than a passing interest in the character's lives. Watchable but forgettable.

This is the kind of flick you watch when you don't want to think too hard but you still want some intelligent humour and a good story. Some jokes are hidden in sarcasm, satire or poignancy, and you might miss them, so it's worth paying attention. The style of this movie's humour may have been a bit before its time, as it resembles currently popular TV shows like Scrubs, The Office and Psych. Even the many colourful characters, including bit-parts, are very believable in today's small-town culture. Do not miss the beginning or the rest wont hold together. Although it lags a bit in the middle, it still satisfies because there's enough variety along the way, that the ending isn't quite as nauseating as you might fear. The soundtrack is excellent and the out-takes at the end wrap it well. For Paul Gross fans, pay attention to his facial expressions - he's more animated compared to many of his other roles.

The film is about the sport of curling, and has a lot of Canadian small-town quirkiness thrown in. That makes it different than most other movies out there. But the plot... If you can't guess what is going to happen every step of the way, then you have never seen any of the innumerable rag-tag-bunch-of-misfits-overcome-the-odds-to-beat-their-adversaries films. It is funny at times, but other jokes are just beaten into the ground. One example is the drunken announcer at the curling match. It was a little funny to begin with, but it got real old. This is the type of movie that you can stand to watch if it is on cable, but don't go out of your way to see it.

"Men With Brooms" has got to be the funniest movie about curling ever (by default)! This is a very Canadian movie, focusing on a very Canadian sport. It had to be a comedy, because dealing with curling, you can't take it too seriously! Paul Gross stars as a former curling star, and Leslie Nielsen appears as a grizzled curling coach. Any American watching the movie can learn some things about curling, while Canadians can be sure the depiction of the sport is authentic. There are funny moments, such as the foursome's dealing with beavers on the road, and the flashy opposing players. You don't have to be Canadian to laugh!

A mix between "A Very Brady Christmas" with it's reunion plot, and "Hard Core Logo" with it's canadian reunion plot. Sometimes funny, mostly cornball or worse. The actors deliver as best they can, nice to see Leslie Nielson for the 5 minutes that he's not just standing around.

The negative reviews point out that the film is cliched. Most comedy these days can be accused of that. What pulls this film up for me is the characters. I live in a small town and recognize these characters as my neighbors. More over, although they are flawed, the residents are treated with respect and love. I think this film nailed the experience of closeness in a village. I also enjoyed watching curling. Who knew the sport was performed with such precision and grace. Probably not the best film for city loving flat landers. It did make me laugh and gave me a buzz of happiness.

This movie was not as funny as I thought it would be at first. Yes, there's some laughs, but no genuine one. It's the Canadian answer to a movie like Independence Day or The Patriot!

The acting is not brilliant, even if Polly Shannon and Molly Parker are good. On a good note, It was nice to see some scenes shot in Sudbury, where I lived for a while, but besides that, the movie has no real value.

Out of 100, I gave it 70. That's good for ** out of **** stars.

Seen in Vaughan, at the AMC Interchange 30 Cineplex, on April 13th, 2002.

I remember hearing about this movie when it was in production and tucking the information away, because it sounded like it might be spiffy--Leslie Nielson, curling, Canadians... yup, sounds spiffy.

So when I was at the video store last night and I saw it sitting on the shelf, that information I'd stored away came hippety-hopping out of wherever it had been tucked, and I went, "Ooh!" and I rented it and was all happy-like and had expectations of spiffiness.

And then it blew.

First of all, what was up with all the humping? Who'da thunk a movie about curling would have so much sex? I wanted to press my nose up against the TV screen and tell the writers in a very slow and patient voice, "Guys, humping just isn't that funny." Okay so the *word* is kind of funny. If you say it over and over again in a really perky voice and let your eyes go kinda blank, that's sort of funny. But people humping every other scene? Eh, not so funny. Farting, old people who swear and/or are randy, dogs humping, poop, and people humping, these just aren't that funny. Given, this movie only gave in to one of those not-so-comedic pitfalls. Oh no wait, there's a scene with a cow farting and pooping, too. Okay but really, aside from the humping, it wasn't a *dumb* movie. Maybe that's why it ended up being so un-spiffy. The cast was good, the chemistry between everyone was good... it just... wasn't... funny. It's a bummer to see a smart movie with a good cast just meander along in the land of mediocrity. Not to mention it's a bummer to have curling and humping inextricably linked in my mind now.

This movie is classically Canadian, from Paul Gross to Leslie Neilson, to curling and The Hip, this movie is every young Canadian girl's dream of a rough hero in the cold to the music that brought us to life back in high school. Get stoned ladies and sink back and enjoy this beautiful classic. Paul Gross is so sexy and the music is exactly how we feel!

OK its no dodgeball, but for an ex-pat stranded in the U.S. the movie is funny. While I've never seen the new Dukes of Hazard movie I would imagine the humour is along the same lines in that, it makes fun of stereotypes of a particular culture. Perhaps like bollywood movies the humour (Canadian spelling) doesn't translate all that well. I mean the close up of the lead actor yelling "sweeeep" is only funny if you've actually seen televised curling. The fact that it's a movie about curling is funny unto itself. Anyway, if you're Canadian and living in Canada this movie is probably only slightly entertaining, if you're American you'll probably missing half the jokes, but if you're Canadian living in the U.S. its well worth the watch. Oh ya i've never seen so many beavers in one movie and the Tragically Hip as the curling team from Kingston is a great touch.

Cheap laughs abound in this movie. Coupled with an overriding lack of believability it amounts to a pretty BIG disappointment.

By the time the seriously flawed ending arrived, I found myself not caring who won the curling match or which girl Paul Gross wrapped his arm around.

The subplot involving Paul Gross' former flame being an astronaut was a waste of time and added nothing to the film. Perhaps it might of worked better if she had been orbiting the earth while the movie was being shot.

Paul Outerbridge reminded me of a low rent William Hurt circa The Big Chill.

Jed Rees seems to play the same character he plays on The Chris Isaak Show. But please, showing him at a sperm bank about to donate?

Leslie Nielsen always adds something to a movie, but has precious little to work with here. The scene where he 'introduces' himself to a cow bordered on pathetic.

The script needed four or five more rewrites at least. After the fifth rewrite they should of thrown it away and started over.

I'm not saying this film is a national embarrassment, but it's close. If Atlantis is going to promote this movie like it's the Canadian equivalent of 'Lord of the Rings' shouldn't they first make sure it's a good film?

Out of ten this movie rates a solid two rocks. The other eight rocks exploded.

I not only wanted to like this movie, I tried to like this movie. I failed.

The subject is curling, so you might think that the script would be as offbeat as the sport. Wrong. This is the most formulaic piece of claptrap I've seen in a long time. "A group of wacky misfits must get back together to beat the odds and win an emotional tournament while putting old ghosts to rest and reconciling with estranged loved ones." It could be the plot of practically every sports movie ever made, but they usually aren't done this dumbly.

Cliches abound: the feisty single mother harbouring a secret crush; the dopehead teammate who can't keep his girlfriends' names straight; the crusty old coach who is also one teammate's father; the henpecked husband who must eventually find his backbone; the dweeby couple trying to conceive a baby; and of course the male lead who must choose between two women (sisters, no less) and atone for past wrongs on the curling rink. YAWN.

Speaking of the copulating couple, whoever saw two people trying to have a kid do the act right in front of his male buddies? And by the way, a woman can only get pregnant once a month, so why does this couple hop on each other in every second scene throughout the whole movie? She'd come running in screaming, "It's time!" and he'd unzip and hump frantically for 5 seconds and then she'd run off again. Hi-lar-ious.

Poop jokes? You couldn't count how many.

I was so bored watching this thing that I started to root for the robo-curler they call Juggernaut. In spite of his expressionless face and mechanical movements, he was the liveliest thing in the movie.

I give it a 3 on 10. The outtakes at the end were the only funny moments I saw.

After being invited to a screening, I was pleasantly surprised to have some Canadian content to watch. A really great looking star to oggle, a lot of inside Canadian jokes, and a nekkid cliff jumping session more than made up for the length of time it took to fill out the survey afterwards.

In Canadian culture (particularly that in Northern Ontario), curling is the sport of the Gods, and Mr. Gross depicted the competetive nature of it perfectly.

Despite gratuitous beaver shots (furry flat-tailed creatures which you can find on Canadian nickels)and the somewhat confusing love interest, the overall tone of the movie is extremely uplifting.

Leslie Neilsen doesn't do as much typical Leslie Neilsen stuff as one might expect, and his portrayal of an aging hippie is a little hard to take after seeing the Naked Gun movies of his slapstick past, but he nonetheless does a good job of it I guess...I've never met an aging hippie.

The film revolves around a curling team which was dissolved after a bitter argument when a coveted trophy was lost to an opposing team, but is forced to re-unite after their coach passes away in a bizarre stone recovery operation with his daughter (nope...not explaining that...go see the movie). For his final wish, he wants the team to get back together and win that trophy.

Heavy training, self-revelations from the team members and a classic dry-humour scene in the bar made the entire test-group fall off their seats in laughter.

If I hadn't been given the free ticket though, the only draw would have been to see Paul Gross, but although I wouldn't pay money to go and see it again, it's definately a Saturday night rental to watch with my sisters.

When I rented this movie, I was expecting some kind of farce (like Airplane or even Red Green). Instead I saw something that couldn't make up its mind what it was. At times it tried to be a romantic comedy (but I couldn't even figure out who the people (especially the women) were, and I couldn't have cared less. At times it tried to give a semi serious introduction to curling, but that aspect was terrible... nobody who knew nothing about curling would know anything more after seeing this thing (and rocks don't break). The best thing about the movie was the ending (that it was finally over). I can't believe that this was produced, shown in theatres, and received anything other than a dog review. Maybe it will be a cult classic like Rocky Horror. It's that bad.

Okay, 'high art' it's not, but it *is* fun. Based on other comments I'd heard, I had extremely low expectations for this film and was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Yeah, so the humor is a little more on the "British" side than I normally enjoy, but what makes this film is the characters, and the solid performances by the outstanding cast. Selling this film as about curling is selling it short, it's about people, the rocks are just the hook. If you're offended by profanity, sex, or slapstick you may want to give it a miss, but if you're looking for a romantic comedy that's a little on the quirky side, and warmhearted without being saccharine, it's definitely worth the time and effort to see it. And effort it may be-- since the US release is bizarrely haphazard and under-advertised(I believe it was released in Denver CO, Scottsdale AZ, Arlington VA, Chicago IL, and Cleveland OH, and in some of those places it didn't even get newspaper ads!). Oh, and the soundtrack is fabulous.

I guess it's because I adore Molly Parker, and have always liked Kari Matchett in the Nero Wolfe series. Unfortunately, they had little to do with the quality of this movie. Or perhaps it's fortunate, because they don't deserve blame for this amateurish TV-quality effort. That goes squarely to Paul Gross, since he wrote the dreadful script, cast himself as the star, and did a banal job of directing. The basic idea of a movie centered around curling has promise, due to the eccentricity of the sport, and the quaintness of the culture from which it emerges. But a story like this needs someone with a much better ear for dialog behind the typewriter, and needs something better than a boring Donny Osmond clone in the lead.

I thought the sexual humour was a bit too much and the jokes a bit low-brow. However, on the whole it is worth watching. If you are Canadian, I would recommend going to the theatre to see it rather than waiting for the video to come out, that's because it's fun to share a moment like this with other Canadians. If you are not from 'the great white north' then you will want to wait for the video.

I put it on a par with Waking Ned Divine or Full Monty.

s.

I actually thought this movie was going to go somewhere. It showed promise; especially with the early part of the movie setting up the relationships among the various friends. But, it descended down into the oblivion that marks many, many mediocre movies using screwball comedy sketches.

There's not much I can say about this film that a true critic would. I can't tell you about the depth in characters or plot, or how unrealistic it might/might not be. I can tell you, though, I did enjoy watching this movie Saturday afternoon in my PJ's with my little sister. In the summer we kids really have nothing better to do sometimes than watch movies and go biking. Only Macy has a bike, so we stayed in one particular day. Roaming through or scalable-less TV stations we found a delightfully odd movie called "Men With Brooms". It was quirky, it was cute, it was all we needed to have a good few hours together. Okay,so it's not the greatest comedy ever written- it serves it's purpose of entertaining and that's all that matters to me. Watch it, enjoy it, don't examine it!

I was a bit disappointed it wasn't as funny as I thought it would be. There was room for improvement (the sperm jokes could of been way funnier) but all in all it was pretty good for a Canadian movie. I think the problem most people have about this movie is the way the comedy is set up. Yes, it's dry but that's what Canadian humor is.

So if you like Canadian humor (Twitch City, Due South) you'll probably enjoy it. If you've never liked that kind of humor, you'll probably hate it.

I gave it a 6 for the overall movie and one extra point for Paul ;-) just cause he's so hot.

Hoo, boy. You might call watching this film Canadian Water Torture. This film has been advertised and pushed and promoted as a big-budget Canadian blockbuster film, has been given as much positive press as could ever be wished for, and all of it is completely unmerited. The trailers from the movie (now, this shows my gullibility for trusting trailers) didn't at all represent the movie. It seems as though the scenes they used for the trailers were made for a different movie, but inserted in this one so they wouldn't have to show the public what the movie was really like.

The plot could simply be summarized as unlikeable losers making a mockery of themselves and, from time to time, an otherwise fine sport, curling. There are some funny scenes where curling stones explode when thrown as hard as possible, but this is not much of a comedy, unless the thought of all that expense undertaken by Alliance Atlantis films to make this piece of garbage strikes the viewer as funny. Rather, this is a dark tale about people living very poorly. There is the one couple which has sex everywhere, publicly, just in the vain hope of reproducing. The audience is left hoping they don't succeed. One romantic subplot is the female proprietor of the town grill, who falls in love with the female police officer. This is presented as one of the cheerful byproducts of the unlikeable losers winning the curling tournament.

Paul Gross stars as the unlikeable star of the film. The height of his unlikeableness comes when, trying to drown out his memories of curling failure, he buys a beer stein and the bar TV from the bartender, only to hurl the stein into the TV. I'm sure it only took about 40 takes for him to get it right. He is also presented as being the Canadian love machine of the millennium, having two sisters fall for him and having to earn their love.

This film also marks the further downward spiral of Leslie Neilsen into complete senility and unfunniness. Yet studios keep using his name, more than his abilities, as drawing power. Wearing a beard to cover his now numerous liver spots, he fails to evoke any laughs as Paul Gross's father and the team's coach.

Although the film's central point is presented as curling, it doesn't figure very prominently into the movie. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as Hoosiers presents Gene Hackman's character more prominently than basketball to great effect. This however is not the case here, as none of the characters have any heroic or positive virtues, and therefore should take no prominent position in any storyline, except perhaps as laughingstocks. I trust this is what the filmmakers had in mind, except they ended up more as objects of scorn and hatred than loveable ne'er-do-wells.

The rest of the film, luckily, I don't seem to remember too well. I do remember hating every second of it, and now I am prepared to launch a lawsuit on Alliance Atlantis for slander, having done more to ruin the reputation of our great land than Jean Chretien and Sheila Copps put together.