Brink is dated, but its themes are timeless
Soul Skating.
I don’t like when movies and TV shows try too hard to be hip. Someone made a video highlighting some of the worst offenders (a few featured: American Dragon: Jake Long, Rocket Power, and Shark Tale). Daria also gives an uncompromising critique:
Brink! (1998) is Disney Channel’s first (and definitely not last) foray into this type of film. The slang, the cuts to people skating every two minutes, the teen drama. It’s all there. Fortunately, the edginess subsides a lot as the movie goes on, but I honestly didn’t understand half of what was said in the beginning.
The more I think about this film, the more I like it. Brink (Erik von Detten — who is, no joke, Sid from Toy Story) skates for the love of it, but has to join a rival team led by the a̶s̶s̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ bully Val (Sam Horrigan) in order to help support his family. Watching the scene where the parents talk about their finances was heartbreaking. It’s something that a lot of kids and adults (like myself) can relate to.
That’s why my favorite character in the beginning was Andy “Brink” Brinker’s father, Ralph (David Graf). He’s the down-to-earth type who doesn’t understand those dang kids and their newfangled slang. He feels more and more disconnected from his teenage son, which is understandable for any parent with a teenager. I can’t relate to some teens now, and I’m in my early twenties.
The only thing I can’t agree with him on is his view that skating for money would be bad because skating got Brink in trouble at school. Brink would be making $200 a week skating. That’s great for both of them! My dad would be ecstatic if I made that much each week doing something. My brother sold Capri-Suns and chips out of a duffel bag and made $100+/week in high school. My dad not only agreed with it, but bought the supplies for him. That’s good parenting.
The worst part is that it felt out of character for his father. The heart-to-heart talk that Ralph has with Brink later in the film should have been in the beginning. He loves that Brink is trying to help out the family during financial troubles. It was never about skating. It was about letting Brink be a kid and do an activity for the fun of it rather than stressing over money; in this case, soul skating vs. joining the X-Bladz and hating it.
To the movie’s (dis)advantage, it was spot-on with its depiction of teenagers as the assholes we all were at that age. Brink’s friends are pretty rude to the rival group, Team X-Bladz (The ‘X’ and ‘z’ show the youth how cool they are, you see). They played pranks on each other and fought over ramps at the local skatepark. Both groups were intolerable in the beginning, but the movie (thankfully) toned itself down by the end.
The only sincere person is Brink, who stops a race not once, but three different times to help an injured competitor. Hell, in the final race against Val, he does the same thing. Sadly, Val uses that concern against Brink by faking his injury to get ahead in the race. But Brink wins anyway, so it all worked out.
Actually, Brink is objectively the best character in the movie. He holds a lot of weight on his shoulders: responsibility to friends, his family, the team he’s playing for. When his friends find out that he’s been playing for the other team, his entire world crumbles.
When his friend gets injured while racing him (thanks to a cheating Val), he helps her out, but gets the cold shoulder from his other friends when he visits her at home. Harsh.
Despite the hostility from his friends, he’s still kind to them. He apologizes to his old friends and buys new equipment for them using his savings (which he got four months in advance — is that normal?). They’re now ready to compete as team Pup-N-Suds, named after his old job.
In the process of quitting Team X-Bladz, he gets support from his new friend, Boomer. Boomer is the ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶ injured Team X-Bladz member he helps in the beginning of the movie. Another fun fact: Boomer is played by Walter Jones, the original black Power Ranger.
There’s one thing that seriously bothered me in the last race. Why weren’t there cameras in one section of the track? How did Val know this information? It felt so contrived, like they needed an excuse in the plot for Val to cheat. Regardless, he cheated anyway by pushing Brink down later on camera, as if no one saw what he did.
Both of them technically cheated, too. Brink cut a corner to jump in front of Val on the last turn to win the race. It was only there to have a cool stunt at the end. I guess Disney had to have a trial run of that before so Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board could perfect that type of finale.
But that’s a minor nitpick in an otherwise decent film. It’s by far the best one I’ve seen so far, and one of the more highly rated ones, according to my friends (And Buzzfeed. And IMDb).
The next one will be the first one I’ve actually seen before, Halloweentown. Let’s see if it still holds up. But first, time to break out my old roller skates.
This is part of an ongoing series on the entire Disney Channel Original Movie canon. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram to r̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶r̶a̶m̶b̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ stay updated on my posts.
