Though, to my mind, football is far and away the world’s greatest sport, it’s always been next to impossible to translate to cinema; it’s never been able to be the driving force behind an actually great film like, say, Any Given Sunday for American football, White Men Can’t Jump for basketball, or any of the countless boxing-based masterpieces. The latest attempt to break this unfortunate streak is Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, which has a very solid foundation to build off – the true story of how American Samoa rose above their status as literally the worst national team in the world – but, sadly, still fails to excite as a sports movie or earn many laughs as a comedy.
Writing alongside Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris, Waititi adapts here the feelgood 2014 documentary about the American Samoa national team. In 2011, ten years after suffering a 31-0 loss to Australia, the worst defeat in the history of the international game, they hired Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) to improve their squad – not enough to actually do anything like, say, qualify for the World Cup, but simply to lead them to score their first ever international goal. It’s an easy heartwarmer of a tale, but Waititi’s approach ends up caught between typical underdog story earnestness and the more zany humour that you might expect from him, leaving both sides flat and lifeless.
Part of the problem is that Fassbender is mostly miscast in the lead. He can definitely be funny, but not *this* kind of funny, the broad jokes asked of him playing badly off of his naturally stony and frightening face. Given how forgettable the film around him is, you need this lead performance to land as a real anchor for everything around it, but Fassbender is only very occasionally allowed to play to his actual strengths and so mostly just fades into the general fog of the ‘wacky’ training sessions and cultural misunderstandings that all feel very first draft.
The Polynesian cast, from Oscar Kightley as the relentlessly positive Tavita, the head of the American Samoa Football Association, to Kaimana as fa’afafine (or third-gender) player Jaiyah, fit more easily into Waititi’s tone, but most of these characters are too thinly sketched to make a real impression. When the final match approaches, the default strengths of the genre do kick in somewhat, making for a briefly uplifting climax, but the lack of depth afforded to the cast makes it a hollow victory that fades almost instantly.
This would be more forgivable if Next Goal Wins was actually funny, but it feels like both Waititi and Morris are on autopilot when it comes to the jokes – there are a couple of laughs at the sheer physical ineptitude of the players early in the story, but these dry up swiftly enough. It’s all also very visually dull, with naff lighting and colour grading making everything look cheap and squandering the natural Pacific beauty of the surroundings.
Unlike, say, Thor 4, Next Goal Wins doesn’t do anything offensively wrong – though another overly self-indulgent Waititi cameo does approach that – but it also just doesn’t really do anything at all. It’s a low-effort, low-demand work that will be forgotten almost as soon as it comes out. Actually shot before Thor 4 and then just delayed constantly until now, Next Goal Wins is not only ‘not worth the wait’, I’m not sure anyone will actually even notice that the wait is over.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 