The Cutting Edge 2: Oh My God, My Eyes, Put Them Out

So, on my top 50 is The Cutting Edge, which is, admittedly, not Casablanca. Yet, it is an enjoyable enough movie with some goofy, quotable dialogue, and came into my life right when I'd completely screwed something up and this movie talked me into going back to the plate and trying it again. It has a special place in my heart. We all have movies like that.

So it was with great dread that I welcomed the commercials for The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold. On the one hand, I love the original. If there could be more like that, I'd be all for it. Plus, who didn't want to know if they actually won the gold medal at the end of the original, a fact that wasn't important to the main story arc and was left out to underscore that it had become unimportant to the two main characters by the end, yet still drove me nuts with wanting to know what happened.

The best thing I can think of to say about the sequel is that it did, in fact, answer that question with a poorly-Photoshopped picture of the two hacks they hired to play Kate and Doug standing on the medal stand in the Gold position.

Oh, the dialogue. So bad.

Oh, the plot. So bad. Contrived arguments. Main characters so flat that you honestly couldn't figure out how they could either like or hate each other, because they were just little cardboard cutouts.

Some shots of the skating were copied directly from the original, as well as some of the music/transitional footage. This was probably meant as a heartwarming homage to the original, but it felt like a tactless lift of material from something good and given to something so so bad that it taints the original just by referencing it. I was so mad when they re-used "Toe pick" and screwed it up.

It's on the TiVo upstairs, and my fingers are itching to go up there and get rid of it. It was so bad. I wish I'd never seen it. Oh, so bad. I'm watching the original now to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Weird to see Terry O'Quinn not playing Locke, though.

Late-Breaking Note: Now that I've watched the original again, the timing on the movies is also way off, which is another level of suckitude for the sequel. In the original movie, they compete in the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. In the sequel, their daughter competes in the Torino Olympics of 2006. My math might be rusty, but that's 14 years in between. Now, even if we assume that Kate gets pregnant the day after they win their gold medal in 1992, she'd give birth late in 1992 or early in 1993, and their daughter would be 13 at the oldest, which is way too young to be nancing about unattended, meeting tattooed in-line skate rats and going to the Olympics. I suppose they might have chosen to adopt a 10 year old in 1992, but they make jokes about who she takes after and is clearly meant to be their biological offspring.

This reminds me of another beef I had with the sequel, that the Kate and Doug characters were nothing like the originals, even given that they would change over the years. If the names hadn't been the same, no one would ever guess they were supposed to be the same people.

I can only assume they found the script on fanfiction.net and filmed it on a dare over a drunken weekend. The suck! Avoid!