Brink! (1998)

I don't usually start off a new month with Disney Week, in fact there's no real structure to any of my 'Week' posts, it's a whenever I feel like it approach, but thanks to holidays and work commitments my movie watching schedule is all over the place at the moment, so fuck it. Starting the month with Disney Week and it's one of the last DCOM's (Disney Channel Original Movie) left in my watchlist actually: Brink! A 1998 movie, and potentially the only movie about Inline Skating - or Blading as we called it in the UK. It was a weird sort of time where Skateboarding, and Blading was suddenly really cool and popular. Literally everybody I know was playing Tony Hawks Pro Skater at the time, and I even brought a skateboard but I sucked at it... inevitably I'm not surprised to see a Disney film borne out of it, but even more surprising is that this might just be the best of the bunch, being very well received and well thought of. Not to say that I don't have more Disney films on my list to work through, because I do, but I may very well have saved the best DCOM for last.

Andy "Brink" Brinkler (Erik von Detten) and his pals Peter (Patrick Levis), Jordy (Asher Gold) and Gabriella (Christina Vidal) a.k.a the Soul Skaters, are a 4 team inline skate crew who have an on-off feud with rivals Val (Sam Horrigan) and his crew the X-Bladz (so edgy). However after a challenge to race around the school goes awry and Brink gets himself and the rest of his pals all suspended on the first day of school, it leads to him discovering his parents are struggling to make ends meet. When Val extends the olive branch in a not-so friendly way to Brink to join X-Bladz and therefore become a sponsored skater and get paid to skate, Brink is obviously conflicted and despite initially refusing to save face in front of his friends, Brink U-turns on the invitation and joins X-Bladz, although relations between him and Val are still strained at best. As Brink struggles to confess to his friends that he's defected to the opposition, even going as far as pretending to be sick so they miss an invitational, and as his Dad continues to be a dick about things and make his life difficult; being confrontational over his skating and then finding him a part time job at a dog grooming parlour, Brink struggles to juggle his various responsibilities. And when his friends discover him skating for X-Bladz at the invitational, they don't take it very well and want nothing more to do with him. Later, as tensions between the two teams escalate at a downhill skating session, Gabriella challenges Val and the X-Bladz to a race with Val nominating Brink to race for them. Despite Brink refusing to skate against his former friends he is egged on Gabriella to race against her and during the race Val tampers with the route causing Gabriella to lose her footing and get seriously hurt. After Brink visits Gabriella at home and finally gets to tell her that he only joined X-Bladz for the money, Gabriella reminds him that everybody might need the money but it's about doing it for the love, not for the money, and when he has something close to heart to heart with his Dad, who stops being a dick for a moment, Brink finally gets his head straight and the following morning, finds Val, confronts him about what happened with Gabriella and quits the team, reconciling with his friends by re-joining their team and through the dog groomers, becoming their sponsor. At the big Championship, the Soul Skaters a.k.a. Team Pup N' Suds don't quite keep pace with the X-Bladz but it comes down to one final skate and Peter just edges Pup N' Suds into the downhill challenge against X-Bladz. At the downhill challenge Brink faces off against Val with relationships between them frostier than ever, and as Brink holds the lead for most of the race, Val resorts to cheating in order to get ahead but when his aggressive tactics backfire and a wild swing at Brink ends with him crashing through the haybale wall, Brink skates back to check on him and Val seizes the opportunity to get ahead by pulling him to the ground. Using a shortcut though, Brink is able to just get ahead and seize the race in the final few seconds, and as he and his pals celebrate winning, with Val exposed as a cheater, X-Bladz approach him to offer him the position of Team Captain, but Brink turns it down saying it "just wasn't any fun."

Yeah. Yeah this was alright. I mean, I've seen a few of these DCOM movies by this point, and I don't know, if I'd gone into this fresh and this was like, my first one or something, then maybe I could have a higher opinion of it? Professionally, there was nothing wrong at all: it was shot just fine, produced just fine, the acting was decent across the board, I just felt like it didn't really break any new ground here and it was very formulaic. The exact same story played out in Eddies Cook Off, and in Alley Cats. They were almost identical in approach really. But maybe if I hadn't seen them first and instead seen this one first I'd feel differently?

But trying to discount that for the moment, in terms of production there was nothing at fault here. It felt less like a TV movie than some of the other Disney movies I've covered. And if you had stuck an opening title sequence at the beginning of this movie you could have passed it off as a cinematic release. There was just a little bit of underdevelopment of Brink and Val's relationship prior to the events of the movie that I felt could have been strengthened - you just go in with the premise set that they are rivals who don't like each other for some reason, it's not really fleshed out, but other than that the rest of the movie is put together just fine. It's very of it's time and very "on brand" for it's subject material. But it's competently produced and nothing really to fault there.

Similarly with the acting everything was spot on. There are sometimes some diluted performances from the younger actors in these movies, and then sometimes there is the complete polar opposite of that and the acting is so intentionally ramped up that it borders on parody but here I felt like the balance was struck just right. Brink's dad is a little bit vanilla in his role and plays out the dick father denying his son from doing what he loves before coming round to it and supporting him - exactly the same as in Eddies Cook Off really - but the roles were acted out professionally and there was a genuine loathing and competitiveness played out between Erik von Detten as Brink and Sam Horrigan as Val. They made it very believable.

Although, and I've touched on it consistently throughout so far, this followed a very familiar coming-of-age pattern that has been done thrice, nearly four times before in the DCOM's I've covered before now and even though the subject matter this time was roller blading, it was essentially just a switch out of the profession for something else. I've seen it covered in Baseball, in Bowling, in Swimming to a degree... here it was Blading and the rest of the story followed the same formula with the same moral message that you shouldn't forsake your friends for the sake of material gain. Or y'know, a message to that effect.

And it was because of that that I'm so down on Brink! For a movie that going in, I had pretty decent expectations for, I don't feel it necessarily disappointed me - I enjoyed it, it felt well paced and I got through it painlessly enough, but it didn't bring anything different, anything unexpected, anything interesting to the table. It plays it very safe. It colours within the lines. And for a movie using the edgy world of Inline Skating as it's main subject matter I think it would have been refreshing to explore a more alternative subject matter. But it ultimately boils down to a DCOM box ticker that follows all the same tropes as the other DCOM movies.

I guess I should point out at this point, that it actually precedes the movies I'm using as comparisons against it by a good couple of years: 1998 this movie was released, Alley Cats 2000 and Eddies 2003 so I guess it's not fair to criticize it retrospectively in comparison with those movies when they're the ones doing the plagiarising here! So on that basis, although I ultimately felt disappointed that it was nothing different, I can at least commend the movie for being something of a trendsetter for DCOM's and I will confess to genuinely enjoying watching it, even if it was predictable and formulaic. As I said earlier I think if I'd have seen this first before the others I'd have probably had a much higher opinion of it than I do now. But it's not a bad movie, it's a good movie. 3 out of 5.