Red Penguins (2019)

Red Penguins: Directed by Gabe Polsky. With Howard Baldwin, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Michael Eisner. Red Penguins tells a story of capitalism and opportunism run amok – complete with gangsters, strippers and live bears serving beer on a hockey rink in Moscow. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the famed Red Army hockey team formed a joint-venture that showed anything was possible in the new Russia. Eccentric marketing whiz, Steve Warshaw, is sent to Russia and tasked to transform team into the greatest show in Moscow. He takes the viewer on a bizarre journey highlighting a pivotal moment in U.S. Russian relations in a lawless era when oligarchs made their fortunes and multiple murders went unsolved.

“My American friends may take offense about the title I chose for this review, but they have to face the fact: the American investors (including the mighty Disney empire, would could only plead plausible deniability) were taken out to the cleaners by a bunch of bankrupt Russian mobsters.nBack in the early 1990s, moments after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the USSR, the US-based Penguins NHL franchise bought a 50% stake in what they believed was the ownership of the most successful hockey team outside North America: the Soviet Army Hockey team (CSKA), which was the backbone of the very successful USSR National team.nOn paper, that was a brilliant, creative idea. For that kind of money, if the Pittsburgh Penguins could get a couple of Stanley Cup winning players, it was worth it. Thatu0026#39;s what they thought. And that side of the story is well covered in the movie.nWhat they did not see, is that they were not entering a playing field they knew the rules of. This is evident in the final minutes of the documentary (even though no one admits that they had no clue as to what awaited them).nI felt that the documentary did a good job of documenting the facts from both sides of the cultural divide. Where it lacks is in any form of critical investigation is about how naive the Penguins were to make this investment in the first place. In fine, this a magnificent reminder about cultural ignorance. And this is where the effort falls somewhat short of the mark, failing to draw the lessons learned from this very remarkable story.nStill very watchable, now that you know the limitations of the piece.”