FUBAR’S Deaner gets a head-banging origin story
Film | Jorge Ignacio Castillo
Deaner ’89
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An interesting new trend in Canadian film are mockumentaries about knuckleheads taken down a peg. Just a few months ago we were treated to the unhinged Hey, Viktor! starring a fringe actor who believes himself a star.
Beats the “coming of age drama in cottage country” fad from the last 20 years, that’s for sure.
Now comes Deaner ’89, a more disciplined take on a similar subject packed with Canadiana and hair metal, with a dash of generational trauma.
Arguably an unsanctioned FUBAR movie (sans Terry Cahill), the film zeroes in on Dean “Deaner” Murdoch (Paul Spence, also the scriptwriter), specifically his days growing up in a small town in Manitoba. Dean is as close as it gets to a golden boy: a hockey sensation. There’s however a sense of dissatisfaction — one that hits overdrive when Dean discovers his bio-dad was Métis and, more importantly, a headbanger.
An identity crisis unfolds: Dean has second thoughts about a potentially lucrative career as a hockey player, causing a rift between him, his parents and his girlfriend. Stuck at a crossroads, Dean adopts the party-hard lifestyle and grows closer to the metal scene and his adoptive sister who, like him, was taken from aboriginal parents and given to a white couple.
The laughs emerge organically from a profoundly immature individual grappling with heavy subjects like identity and destiny. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage from 50-something Spence playing Dean as a teenager with veteran comedic performers (Kevin McDonald, Will Sasso, Mary Walsh) as “grown-ups”. Equally amusing is revisiting some late-’80s staples: satanic panic, rock-’em sock-’em hockey, muscle cars and Dokken.
While it’s perfectly consistent with the rest of the movie, the second half of Deaner ’89 isn’t as compelling. The Dean Murdoch shtick gets tired (much like in the FUBAR movies) and a last-minute plotline involving two incompetent criminals is unnecessary. Considering the movie’s decision to use the Scoop as a plot point, a deeper dive into that would have been a more sensible choice.