Next Goal Wins sees Taika Waititi threatening to have fun with a sports underdog story. Turns out, he’s not in that kind of mood. Here’s our review:
The second big screen telling of American Samoa’s national football team bears exactly the same name as the first – that’d be Next Goal Wins – but somewhat inevitably, proves to be a very different beast.
In 2014, we got a documentary feature, that charted the story of the team at a point when it was ranked as the worst in the world. The catalyst for change came with the appointment of coach Thomas Rongen, who brought a fair amount of baggage with him. The story was superbly charted in the documentary, but inevitably, it didn’t get too many eyeballs on it.
But it did get the attention of Taika Waititi, who signed on to dramatise the story. He directs and also co-wrote the script with The Inbetweeners co-creator Iain Morris. Adopting a relatively light tone, they tell the same story, but in the midst of it all, lose something along the way.
The same ingredients are in place. We meet an American Somoa team as it suffers a record 31-0 defeat in an international football match against Australia. If you’re not a football person, let me assure you that a 31-0 defeat is a Very Bad Result. I’m a Birmingham City fan, and even we’ve not done that badly.
Drastic action is called for, and that involves recruiting Michael Fassbender, his character here – Thomas Rongen – demonstrating significantly less preparation than we saw in The Killer recently. Instead, it’s a lighter Fassbender, edging towards but not fully going for the potential comedy here. A warm, lightly beating heart for the film. But then he’s the force that everyone else can bounce off, and to a small degree, they do.
Next Goal Wins does seem more interested in Rongen than the players on the team though, with the exception of Kaima as transgender player Jaiyah Saelua. She gets a subplot which at times threatens to be given a bit more emphasis than it ultimately gets. Yet as with most things in Next Goal Wins, the mountains the characters have to navigate feel a little more like molehills. The drama doesn’t fully click.
In fact, there’s a further subplot about Rongen’s relationship with his ex-wife and her new partner – played by Elisabeth Moss and Will Arnett – but it doesn’t really seem to fit at all. Furthermore, Taika Waititi pops up as a priest, suggesting a film willing to push at the edges of things just a little, and to go a tiny bit wild. Yet Next Goal Wins isn’t that movie.
Instead, it’s a straightforward telling of a heartwarming story.
It’s always a bit tough to critique a true story for doing just what you expect it to do, in roughly the order that it does. But, er, Next Goal Wins does exactly what I expected to do and, yep, in that order.
Contrast it with something like Dexter Fletcher’s superb Eddie The Eagle film. In that, I was flat-out rooting for Taron Egerton’s take on Eddie, and there’s a moment at the end of the movie involving Edwards’ father that had me welling up. Or what about Champions from earlier this year, which flew in and out of cinemas, and feels like it’s waiting to find a bigger audience than it got. Both of those films also did, narratively, pretty much what I expected them to do. But heck, I was absolutely invested in the pair of them.
Watching Next Goal Wins, I was pleasantly entertained, but nothing really was going much deeper. I enjoyed it at the time, my kids enjoyed it at the time, and yet none of us have mentioned it since.
The presence of Taika Waititi may, not unreasonably, lead you to expect a film that upends the template and tone of the underdog sports story. Surprisingly, Waititi feels like he’s almost glued himself to it.
End result? It’s perfectly fine. A perfectly amiable 1-1 draw of a film, that leaves you checking the match day programme to see when the next game is.
Next Goal Wins is out in UK cinemas on the 26th December.
