Red Penguins (2020)

By: Mike Ward on Friday, August 21

PG-13 Running Time: 80 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

  • Fans of documentaries which share stories so wild they must be true will find much to appreciate in Red Penguins.

  • There is a cast of characters on display here that you couldn’t script…even if you wanted to.

  • Timely, for lots and lots of reasons, but also a movie that may hang around the conversation come awards season for documentary filmmaking.

NO

  • Your name is Michael Eisner and you used to be the CEO of Disney.

  • A movie on Russian/American relations feels like just too much of what has been dominating the news cycle in the last year or two. You’ll miss out on a great movie - but I get it.

  • Perhaps it rushes too quickly and leaves more questions than answers by the end.


OUR REVIEW

An astonishing real-life political/sports boondoggle if there ever was one, Red Penguins documents a bizarre partnership between the Pittsburgh Penguins NHL hockey team and the Soviet Union, in the late-1980s and early 1990s. Timely, in an entirely different and unintended way with current world events, the film arrives on home video and VOD a bit under the radar, with a rather remarkable story to tell.

Director Gabe Polsky, who made the documentary Red Army in 2014 about the national Soviet hockey team and the formation of a group of all-star hockey players dubbed The Russian Five, mines the topic for another intriguing gem. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the reformation of Russia, and Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s Prime Minister, times take on a different kind of difficult for the Russian people. A newfound democracy and international economy falters almost instantly. As one interviewee in the film shares: You can’t just give people democracy who have never experienced it and expect everything to work perfectly.

At around this same time, the historic Russian Red Army hockey team finds itself hemorrhaging money and desperation sets in. Seeking a partnership with the National Hockey League, whose team owners have recruited several of the Soviet Union’s best players for their teams, Red Army leadership contacts the NHL, sniffing around for a comrade or two to do business with.

Enter Pittsburgh Penguins management and a pavement pounding of sorts to roust up celebrity investors who can infuse cash into sustaining the Red Army team and franchise. As deals are struck and celebrities like Michael J. Fox (!) are into the deal for millions, the Russian Penguins are born. A wild-eyed, devil-could-care marketing executive, Steven Warshaw, rides into the picture like a savior on a white stallion, hoping to reinvent the experience of watching hockey in Mother Russia.

Part of the fun of Red Penguins comes with the zealousness of hearing the origins of how the Red Army transformed into the Russian Penguins. An underground strip club of all things, discovered in an adjacent basement to the Red Army’s hockey arena proves too rich for Warshaw to ignore. As is the native nationalism of actual bears performing before games and during breaks between periods. Because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, Warshaw keeps pushing envelopes and his efforts find waves of success.

Strippers become makeshift cheerleaders. Games and on-ice shenanigans make hockey games fun again. The Russian Penguins are a phenomenon, and soon Disney, of all companies, sees potential in reinventing its Mighty Ducks franchise and making tens of millions of dollars off a Disney/Russia union.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, as Polsky points out, the cultural climate outside of the hockey arena was one of despair, confusion, and political dysfunction. Under Yeltsin, by the summer of 1993, Russia’s economy was in shambles. Politically, the country had no concept of what type of democracy it wanted to implement. Constitutional debates and proposed amendments heightened chaos. Crime escalated while poverty grew. A violent constitutional crisis nearly brought Russia to its knees as Yeltsin dissolved Parliament.

As Red Penguins moves through its steps, the tone of the film shifts from a comedic, so-crazy-it-has-to-be-true setup into a story unnerving and intensely unsettling. As Red Army leaders are caught cooking the books and stealing considerable money from the hockey team, American investors begin to wonder how deep into all of this they are and just what they may have gotten themselves into.

While some of the individuals Polsky interview in the film are laughing in the film’s first half, and we laugh right along with them, as more of the story unfolds - as realities of Russian life and Russian/American tension is folded into the story - those fits of laughter take on a different meaning altogether.

Red Penguins is not without its controversies. Then-CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, has categorically denied much, if not all, of the assertions made by Warshaw and Polsky and others regarding the extent of Disney’s involvement. Notably, he declined to appear in the film. Warshaw is definitely a storyteller, the kind who seems like he might be embellishing the truth more often than not and whose stories seem coded with nods and winks.

Red Penguins is a deeply compelling film that underscores the tenuous nature of Russian/American relations and takes on unique relevance in an era where terms like “kompromat”, “Mueller Report”, and “Russian interference” have taken on a life of their own in the last few years in American politics and pop culture.

CAST & CREW

Documentary Featuring: Steven Warshaw, Howard Baldwin, Valery Gushin, Victor Gusev, Alexander Lyubimov, Tom Ruta, Alxander von Bush, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, Alexander Baranovsky.

Director: Gabe Polsky
Written by: Gabe Polsky
Release Date: August 4, 2020
Universal Pictures