Gunpowder & Sky
In the late 1980s the Detroit Red Wings were the laughing stock of the NHL and were often referred to as the Detroit ‘Dead Wings’. For years, many people thought that the team was going nowhere and there needed to be a shift in the clubhouse and in the front office. The founder of Little Caesar’s Pizza bought the team in 1982 with hopes of bringing the Stanley Cup home to Detroit. Mike IIitch hired Jimmy Devellano as the General Manager of the Red Wings. Devellano took an unconventional route to obtaining key players of a championship team by heading to Russia to convince five Russian players to come back to the Motor City and play for the Red Wings.
Joshua Riehl’s new documentary The Russian Five captures what it took to convince five Russian hockey players to leave their home and head to Detroit to play American hockey during the Cold War. The five Russians — Sergei Federov, Igor Larionov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, and Vladimir Konstantinov — emigrated to America not knowing the customs of the United States and ended up becoming national heroes.
Growing up I played a lot of hockey video games. I wasn’t very athletic, but I still loved the sport. I was always drawn to choosing the Detroit Red Wings as the team I wanted to play as. I was young and didn’t know much about the history of the Red Wings besides the players I saw on the game. After watching this documentary, I have a little more insight into the history of the team in the 90s and what it took to create a team that won back-to-back Stanley Cups in the mid-90s.
Riehl obviously has a love for the game and the ‘Russian Five’. A lot of effort went into interviewing the managers and players on the Red Wings team during the 90s. Even Jeff Daniels, a fan of the Red Wings, appeared during the documentary. The film also provided some sequences of how they scouted the players through animation. The animation was simple, but it showed how everything went down in an exciting way.
The Russian Five was perfectly paced with enough momentum growing up until the very end when the Detroit Red Wings won their second Stanley Cup in the 90s. The film started off by explaining the lows of the Red Wings and how things needed to change, and they looked to the enemies during the Cold War. Through the well-planned animation and interviews, I was able to get a feel on how everything went down. The process almost seemed like a spy movie with scouts hiding behind arenas with the car lights turned off waiting for the players to exit the stadium after a game. Through a lot of money bags and convincing, scouts and the GM were able to sneak five Russian players out of the country to America. After everyone arrived in America, the film was able to provide enough backstory on each of the players, so you felt comfort with them and feel the love they had for hockey. As the documentary got closer and closer to the epic Stanley Cup run the Red Wings had, it also captured the down points in having the Russian players on the team.
Nobody believed that five Russian hockey players would be able to bring a championship to a city that was having a post-season drought. Riehl captured that it wasn’t easy for the players to adjust to a new country, new teammates and a new lifestyle. With a set-up of getting to know the players, watching them lose often in the playoffs, and then winning it big in the mid 90s, it made the celebration much sweeter to watch. Six days after wining their first Stanley Cup, Konstantinov was involved in a limousine accident, which ended his career. Fetisov was also involved in the accident but recovered to return in 1997-1998 season. The team wore a special patch on their jersey that said ‘Believe’ and that carried them to their second consecutive championship. It was a hard time for the Red Wings, but Riehl made sure to perfectly capture the emotions the team and city felt after loosing Konstantinov and then going on to wining the Stanley Cup.
The Russian Five was an insightful documentary showcasing what a bold GM and owner did to get five Russian hockey players to the NHL. It played out like a spy film and I was interested to see how each player would get to Detroit. By watching the Red Wings fail year after year in the Stanley Cup finals and then finally winning it all is something truly amazing and inspirational. I could sit all day and watch a team win the Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, or the World Series and celebrate all day. The reason I love sports so much is perfectly captured in The Russian Five.
The Russian Five has a run time of 1 hour 42 minutes and is not rated.
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