Stand! Parent Guide

After fleeing the Bolshevik uprising in the Ukraine, Stefan (Marshall Williams) and his father Mike Sokolowski (Gregg Henry) are working in Winnipeg to raise enough money to bring the rest of their family to Canada. Stefan has even met a nice young girl, Rebecca Almazoff (Laura Slade Wiggins), who encourages his involvement with the city’s emerging labor movement. Meanwhile, as the Canadian Expeditionary Force returns home from World War I in 1919, the troops find their jobs filled by immigrant families like the Sokolowskis who are working at half wages. With costs going up and jobs scarce, conflicts between different immigrant groups and the veterans threaten to destabilize the city. When labor organizers propose a mass general strike to force employers to pay a living wage, the community is only divided further - with Stefan and Rebecca on one side and Mike on the other.

I like musicals as much as the next guy - more, if my male friends are any benchmark for masculine opinion of the genre. And I hate to say it but Stand! is almost unspeakably bad. The music is unoriginal and the lyrics sound like a bad high-school poetry project. They are poorly integrated into the story, both thematically and acoustically. For the audience, it’s particularly jarring when characters suddenly lose their eastern European accents as soon as they start to sing. Director Robert Adetuyi apparently didn’t consider choreography an important part of a musical, a significant error which leaves the actors (obviously) lip-syncing at each other while awkwardly standing in the middle of roads, in freeze-frame asides, or on one notable occasion, across a dead body. There’s no musical movie magic here – just poorly thought out mediocrity.

Stand! also fails to avoid one of the most common problems in historical fiction – namely, giving period characters 21^st century opinions, grounded in a contemporary world view. Instead of being people of their time, they become nothing more than modern characters playing dress-up. Not only does this suck any educational value out of the film, it also diminishes its value as entertainment. And if that weren’t enough to kill the flick, the characters are the flattest cardboard cutouts I’ve ever had the misfortune to spend two hours watching. I’ve never wanted a crossover with Rambo quite so intensely. At least in Rambo, the cardboard cutouts get shot before they have a chance to burst into song.

There aren’t many content concerns in this tedious film - the violence is limited and portrayed as unnecessary, the alcohol use is always indicative of characters making poor decisions, and the profanity is almost entirely in the same vein. But this is another example of a movie where appropriate content does not equate with entertaining viewing. Just because it’s inoffensive doesn’t mean it’s good. And I’m not alone on this one - an elderly couple seated near me decided to give up and walk out around the one-hour mark. Sometimes, retreating can be a better decision than standing your ground…

Stand! is only screening in Canadian theaters.