The Cutting Edge movie review (1992)

The movie stars Moira Kelly as a brilliant but troublesome prima donna, and D. B. Sweeney as a tough hockey player, forced out of the game by an eye injury, who is recruited to be her latest partner. She's a spoiled rich brat who has a history of chewing up her partners and spitting them out; he comes from a long line of hockey players who view figure skating with contempt. Their mission, dictated by the formulas of countless similar films: Train together over long months while fighting most of the time, meanwhile falling in love without knowing it, until their romance reaches a crisis point at the precise moment when they're going for the Olympic gold.

If this material is old as primeval cinematic sludge, the actors bring it a certain freshness. Kelly is effective as the stubborn, strong-willed star who would rather fight than skate, and Sweeney is likable as her unwilling partner. They also look at home together on the ice; perhaps doubles were used for some of the shots (I don't know), but the ice footage has been so expertly assembled that we always believe we are looking at Kelly and Sweeney, and there are a lot of shots where it is definitely them, undoubled, doing very high-class skating. Kelly looks like a talented skater, and Sweeney, who played some convincing basketball in "Heaven Is a Playground," apparently has considerable athletic skills.

The supporting roles are all checked out from the library of stock characters. There's Roy Dotrice as Anton, the grizzled but likable veteran coach who tries every trick in the book to get his troublesome pair to work together. And Terry O'Quinn as Kelly's millionaire father, who builds her a private practice rink and has a trophy room that includes a big empty case for the Olympic gold medal. And there's Dwier Brown as Kelly's smug boyfriend, a financier who has to be rejected, of course, if the working-class hockey player is going to have a chance.