I didn’t know anything about the 1986 Youngblood. I guess in Canada, any hockey movie counts as IP probably. Plus, this 2025 update is so hilariously Canadian, it feels like an apology for the 90s kids in Canada watching Youngblood, working as a PSA to do the opposite.
The 1986 film was about Dean Youngblood trying to toughen up to fight the big bad enforcer. The 2025 movie flips it; this Dean (Ashton James), is more than tough: raised by a single father Blane (Blair Underwood) who knew no other way to play than to always pick a fight with the biggest guy and knock them out. Dean’s got that anger inside of him, short tempered and easy to piss off, not helped by the fact there aren’t a lot of black hockey players around him. After a bad suspension, Dean gets sent to the Hamilton Mustangs, where Coach Murray Chadwick (Shawn Doyle) and team captain Denis Sutton (Henri Richer-Picard) have to rebuild Dean to be a team player if he wants to keep his dream of playing hockey alive, even though enforcer Carl Racki (Donald MacLean Jr.) is waiting for Dean and the Mustangs in the playoffs.
Despite the flip, 2026’s Youngblood is about as old fashioned a sports movie as you can think of. You’ve got a kid from a sad past: Dean’s loving mom Ruby (Olunike Adeliyi) died when he was young. That kid has a coach with a haunted past, and a friend he didn’t know he had (captain Sutton). Plus a love interest, Jessie (Alexandra McDonald), who happens to be the coaches daughter and a hockey player herself (shocker!). Now our poor protagonist is trapped between worlds, where there will be setbacks, and a Carl Racki like horrible villain lurking to test our hero’s growth. I knew where Youngblood was going the minute I started watching it. There’s some wrinkles here and there: there’s a great scene on the team bus where all the players reveal how obsessed their parents were about their talents, and how it drastically affected them, and a racial undercurrent that is everpresent but never overused ickily. But the story stays surface level mostly, never changing until the story dictates characters have to. The biggest disappointment is the hockey scenes, which they didn’t have a lot of money to film for, so they don’t look as polished/exciting as I hoped they would be, resorting to Taken like quick cuts to hide everything.
What you see is what you get with Youngblood. A once over and little more money and this could have been new Mighty Ducks for Canada. But alas, the flying V remains undefeated. Quack, quack, quack, quack!