Slap Shot is a 1977 American sports comedy film directed by George Roy Hill, written by Nancy Dowd, and starring Paul Newman and Michael Ontkean.

It depicts a minor league ice hockey team that resorts to violent play to gain popularity in a factory town in decline.

While Slap Shot received mixed reviews upon release and was only a moderate box-office success, it has since become widely regarded as a cult film.

In the fictional Rust Belt town of Charlestown, Pennsylvania, the local steel mill is about to close permanently and lay off 10,000 workers.

This threatens the existence of the town's minor league ice hockey team, the Charlestown Chiefs, which is already struggling with a losing season, indifferent players, and an increasingly hostile crowd.

As a money-saving measure, the team's penny-pinching manager, Joe McGrath, begins selling equipment and signs three young, immature brothers, the Hansons.

After seeing Charlestown fans responding positively to violence, Dunlop unleashes the Hansons, whose play mainly consists of brutalizing the other team.

To motivate the players, he leaks to a newspaper a fabricated story about a potential sale to a community in Florida, hoping that if the team becomes popular, it will actually happen.

Dunlop attempts several times to reconcile with his estranged wife Francine, who intends to obtain a divorce and take a job in Long Island.

[15] Al Pacino wanted to play the role of Reggie Dunlop (#7) but director George Roy Hill chose Paul Newman instead.

The Reggie Dunlop character is based, in part, on former Eastern Hockey League Long Island Ducks player/coach John Brophy, who receives homage by his last name being used for the drunken center of the Hyannisport Presidents.

Like Ogie Ogilthorpe, Goldie Goldthorpe is also infamous for his rookie season in professional hockey (1973) when as a member of the Syracuse Blazers he amassed 25 major fighting penalties before Christmas.

We met them again in the [1974 –75 season] finals and beat them four straight.A scene in the film shows the Hanson brothers jumping the Peterborough Patriots during pre-game warm-ups.

The next game in the series was held in Johnstown, and the Jets retaliated by attacking the Norsemen players during the warm-ups, with a huge brawl erupting.

In real life a similar incident occurred in Utica, New York, in a game between the Johnstown Jets and the Mohawk Valley Comets.

[23] Reviews were mixed, and ranged from Rex Reed writing in The Daily News that it was “violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting,” to Newsweek's assertion that the film was “tough, smart, cynical and sentimental—the key ingredients in our new pop populism.”[13] Variety wrote that "director George Roy Hill is ambivalent on the subject of violence in professional ice hockey.

You can't really have it both ways, and this compromise badly mars the handsomely made Universal release, produced by Robert Wunsch and Stephen Friedman.

"[24] Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the performances as "impeccable" and thought the film had "a kind of vitality to it," but found it "unfunny" and noted an "ambiguous" point of view with regard to violence.

[25] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times was negative, writing that since the "characters possess so little dimension and since we have so little opportunity to get to know and therefore care about them, their incessantly brutalizing behavior and talk can only seem exploitative in effect.

"[28] Gene Siskel gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four in his original print review, writing that "what Slap Shot does to its ultimate failure is exaggerate every one of its fine facets.

"[31] The Wall Street Journal's Joy Gould Boyum seemed at once entertained and repulsed by a movie so "foul-mouthed and unabashedly vulgar" on one hand and so "vigorous and funny" on the other.

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker was mixed, writing that "I don't know that I've ever seen a picture so completely geared to giving the public 'what it wants' with such an antagonistic feeling behind it.

We wish "putting on the foil or "buying a soda after the game" could help but instead we will reflect and pray God gives peace and comfort during this time.

In 1998, Maxim named Slap Shot the "Best Guy Movie of All Time" above acknowledged classics such as The Godfather, Raging Bull,[37] and Newman's own Cool Hand Luke.