Junior is a little sweetheart. Yul is a bitter hardass. Add to this the fact that Junior’s screwup on the track cost Yul and Derice a trip to the Summer Olympics, and you’ve got contrasting personalities brought into direct tension by unusual circumstances. Then they get recruited to join Derice’s bobsled team, and have to sit balls-to-ass in a tiny metal sled throttling down an icy mountain. Obviously they’re going to become best friends, right??
The relationship seems to develop out of Yul’s sympathy for Junior’s plight with his father, over Yul’s naïve ambitions, and through their ability to actually complement each other’s weaknesses. Junior is a lovely young man but a total puss when it comes to standing up for himself, and Yul helps him bring out his inner “badass mother.” It’s hard to tell whether Yul is a father figure to Junior or not, but Junior does seem to see some of his father’s ambitions in Yul, even if Yul doesn’t have the education required to know what Buckingham Palace looks like. Perhaps Yul sees some of himself in Junior; his own background and family situation is unknown. Maybe he’s so desperate to get off that “crummy island” because of his own strained relationship with his parents. Whatever their reasons, their resulting friendship is one of the movie’s sweetest movies, even to a cynical, disillusioned old bastard like me.
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Published: Aug 20, 2013 03:41 pm