I saw CELTIC PRIDE in a theater in 1996. I was a kid, and I still liked most movies at that point. Even then, something felt off. I couldn't have told you what it was. I just knew that I was supposed to be rooting for these two guys and I wasn't.
It took me thirty years and two viewings to figure out why.
By 1996, the Celtics were no longer a team anyone celebrated. The Bird era was over. The Boston Garden had already closed and was waiting to be torn down. The team was bad — genuinely, embarrassingly bad — stuck in the kind of rebuilding purgatory that has no romantic name. This was after Larry Bird, and well before Paul Pierce. If you were a Celtics fan in 1996, you were a person in mourning who hadn't fully accepted it yet.
I came to the Celtics later, and sideways. Seattle still technically had a team when Ray Allen got traded to Boston, but nobody was paying attention anymore. You don't abandon a franchise. Sometimes a franchise abandons you first.
The setup is simple enough. Two Boston superfans kidnap Utah Jazz star Lewis Scott the night before game seven of the NBA Finals, hoping to keep him out of the game long enough for the Celtics to win a championship. They didn't exactly plan it — they blacked out, and Scott was just there when they came to. But they make the conscious decision to keep him, which is where the moral accounting should begin. It never really does.
CELTIC PRIDE wants you to find this charming. Two lovable obsessives doing a desperate thing for the team they love. The problem is that Lewis Scott didn't do anything to them. He's just very good at basketball. Mike and Jimmy are committing a felony against a man whose only offense was being employed by the wrong franchise.
A movie built on this premise has two options. It can commit to the comedy and make everything weightless enough that the audience never stops to think about it. Or it can acknowledge the darkness and do something honest with it. CELTIC PRIDE tries to split the difference and ends up with neither.
This is a movie that has opted out of consequence entirely. A police officer shows up while Scott is being held at gunpoint and just walks away. Later, Mike's wife learns about the kidnapping and doesn't call the police. By the end, Scott himself covers for them. And in case that wasn't enough, they receive a hundred thousand dollars for their trouble. It isn't just saying the kidnapping was fine. It's saying everyone benefited from it.
The closest comparison I can think of is BIG FAN, a 2009 film that takes a similar premise — obsessive fan, athlete, a line that gets crossed — and never blinks. That film understands that this kind of story only works if you're willing to look directly at what fanaticism actually costs. CELTIC PRIDE keeps looking away.
Daniel Stern is the most capable actor in the cast and the most wasted. Anyone who has seen him in DINER or BREAKING AWAY knows what he can do with a character who is quietly falling apart. There are traces of that here — the divorce, the failed athletic dreams that Carol's therapist has already diagnosed — but it never follows through on any of it. Instead it asks him to ride the goodwill of his HOME ALONE persona until the wheels fall off. Mike O'Hara had the potential to be genuinely tragic. He ends up being Marv with a Celtics jersey.
Dan Aykroyd is a different problem. His best work has always leaned into his strangeness — BLUES BROTHERS, GHOSTBUSTERS, even CONEHEADS finds the right vehicle for his particular energy. Jimmy Flaherty needed someone whose obsession reads as unhinged and human simultaneously. Aykroyd comes across as unhinged and alien. The Boston accent doesn't help. It hits the broad markers but never finds the rhythm, and by the third scene the accent begins to overwhelm the character.
Christopher McDonald is playing a familiar variation of himself. In this case, that's exactly what the movie requires — a coach radiating Tom Thibodeau levels of sideline stress.
Damon Wayans, to his credit, is competent. That sounds like faint praise and it is, but competent is the ceiling in a film this untethered. He's playing the only character with any grounding in actual consequence, and he doesn't oversell it. The press conference apology is a good example — his character explains his back problems come from carrying a sorry excuse for a team all season. It lands somewhere between groan and laugh, which is probably the best CELTIC PRIDE ever manages.
There is something performative about the fandom here that never goes away. Mike and Jimmy feel less like obsessives and more like two men doing an impression of what fanaticism looks like. The jerseys, the memorabilia, the superstitions — it all reads as a costume rather than a life. A real fanatic has a specificity to their devotion that is almost impossible to fake. These two could take the jerseys off and go home.
CELTIC PRIDE is rated PG-13, which means the real texture of Boston sports fandom in that era is completely off the table. Anyone who has spent time around that particular strain of New England loyalty knows it has edges it was never going to touch. What you're left with is a sanitized version — fandom as the studio imagined it.
The best thing in CELTIC PRIDE is a peripheral character named Ilyalurtz Bronfermakher, listed in the credits simply as Lurch. He is a seven foot Eastern European player on the Jazz roster who gets approximately four minutes of screen time and is more fully realized than anyone the script is focused on. Vladimir Cuk, who plays him, was a real basketball player before he was an actor, and the cadence he brings to the role is not something you could coach. When Lurch tells his coach he has got the bad crap, and then misses a sure slam dunk, it is the funniest moment in the movie. When he is finally called off the bench late in the game and informs the coach he will be giving them some of that death row shit, you almost wish the movie was about him instead.
The most unexamined relationship in the movie is Mike's wife Carol. Carol is established early as the voice of reason — she has been holding divorce papers for years, her therapist has diagnosed the obsession, she has clearly had enough. Then the kidnapping happens and she just stops being a person. She doesn't report it. She roots for the Jazz to protect her husband from consequences. And presumably stays married to him at the end. CELTIC PRIDE spends the first act building her as someone who finally sees clearly, then quietly asks her to forget all of it. She never gets an explanation and neither does the audience.
CELTIC PRIDE closes with two scenes that tell you everything. After the Celtics win, a police officer asks Lewis Scott if these two men have perpetrated a crime against him. Scott looks at Mike and Jimmy and says "I know these two jerks, they're my friends." No consequences, no accountability, no acknowledgment that anything wrong occurred. The victim absolves his kidnappers because the movie needs a tidy ending and couldn't think of a better way to get there.
And then, seven months later, Mike and Jimmy are outside Deion Sanders' house. In a better movie this might have worked as a jokey button that sends the audience out laughing. Here it just confirms what you already suspected. CELTIC PRIDE doesn't just let them off the hook. It endorses them, suggests that kidnapping athletes is simply what devoted fans do, and that getting away with it once is a reasonable argument for doing it again. CELTIC PRIDE mistakes the absence of consequence for charm. They are not the same thing.
I knew something was wrong with this movie when I was a kid. Thirty years later I can finally explain it. CELTIC PRIDE is a movie about getting away with it. Unfortunately that applies to the filmmakers too.
Final Verdict: 33 out of 100
