In all walks of professional sport, while star players bathe contentedly in the soothingly warm waters of public adoration and lucrative career contracts, there exists below them a sub-culture of athletes blessed not with supreme talent but with a unerring, almost fanatical dream to make it to the top.

Scrapping it out away from the glare of the mainstream media, they are forced to subsist on meagre wages and survive only by clinging to the dream that one day they will reach the promised land.

These are the untouchables of sport?s caste system.

Jason Gileno?s brutally honest documentary ?Les Chiefs?, a film about five ice hockey players gritting it out for a semi-professional team in the town of Laval, Quebec, offers an often painful insight into the unforgiving world of some of life?s most persistent optimists. One of the film?s real strengths is its lack of pretension. Shorn of all the gut-wrenching sentimentality of dramatised sports films such as ?Miracle?, the gag-worthy, depressingly jingoistic account of America?s Olympic ice hockey triumph in 1980, ?Les Chiefs? offers a refreshingly humble, welts-and-all viewing experience. The underlying tragedy of these people, struggling mostly in vain to achieve great things in a sport they love so dearly, is graphically illustrated.

In particular, the story of Tim, the somewhat naive, simple-minded giant who goes for a trial at an NHL team, only to be seen at the film?s conclusion living in a cramped, dirty basement and washing dishes for five dollars an hour, does tug at the heart strings. But in general the film is handicapped by its inability to get to grips with the deeper psychological questions implicit in their self-imposed, penniless existence. While often threatening to travel down interesting avenues, to examine the core of exactly why these men drag their families through the weekly torture of such lives, in truth the protagonists lack the necessary intellect to adequately explain why they do what they do. They simply do, take it or leave it ? a fact which unfortunately leaves the film feeling rather hollow and light-weight.

While the constant on and off ice brawling and the unashamed male bravado is initially entertaining, what could have been an impressively sophisticated exploration of this remarkable culture, turns into nothing more than a gruesome boxathon on ice ? complete with a monotonous succession of uninspiring, vacuous interviews.