The Cutting Edge
★★★ 1/2
The Cutting Edge is a movie that is perfectly made for a laid back weekend morning. Is it cheesy? Yes. Does it seem dated? Yes. Do you stop and watch it when you are flipping the channels? Most definitely yes.
Like Dirty Dancing, this movie has a cult-like feel that you can't help but be drawn towards. Is the fact that The Cutting Edge doesn't know it's extremely campy, make it work so well? Thankfully it possesses the chemistry between leads D.B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly because there are many aspects of this movie that hasn't aged well. You can tell that a lot of it is having to compensate for a small budget. There are a lot of film tricks that are implemented to make us fill in the gaps of a large audience, including a ridiculous close-up of an American flag. With a movie like this, it's unfair to ask actors to learn how to skate like actual Olympians, but the slow-mode, shudder frame rate that is used to compensate for this gets old and grating.
Thankfully director Paul Michael Glaser knows to lean on the banter and the entertaining montages to make this movie move. As silly as this premise is, you buy into this relationship. The screenplay always has the motives of the characters in mind which makes for an understandable and extremely satisfying conclusion to this movie. My wife will probably kill me for not giving it five stars, but sometimes the movies that don't make the top 100 list of all-time great films aren't the ones you watch the most.
