Breakaway
- Genre: Comedy
- Director: Robert Lieberman
- Stars: Vinay Virmani, Russell Peters, Anupam Kher
- Rate: **
A hockey star whose dad is upset that his son doesn’t aspire to be a trucker? An all-Sikh team that can’t hit the ice because the players won’t swap their turbans for helmets? Cue the canned laughter.
Breakaway is a comedy, but it reflects the colors of Canada’s fast-changing social mosaic, at least outside of the NHL. Visit a suburban GTA rink and you’ll see that minor-league hockey is no longer exclusively “a white man’s game,” despite a character lament. That’s about as far as it goes for valuable insights in this pleasant timewaster, which has a good cast but a not-so-good script.
Newcomer Vinay Virmani gets partial praise for the former and a slap for the latter: he plays the likeable lead striver, but he’s also responsible for a tired screenplay that shamelessly steals from Bend It Like Beckham. The film even has Beckham’s Anupam Kher in the same role of the parental culture cop.
