Mark Reviews Movies: KING OTTO

King Otto, MPI Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 24, 2022

King Otto announces the end of its story at the beginning. This is a documentary about the national soccer—or, for most of the world, football—team of Greece and its surprising victory at the Euro 2004 tournament. Nobody believed they could do it, but through hard work, the team defeated some of the best clubs in the world to bring home the championship trophy.

If we know all of this from the start, what's the point of Christopher André Marks' documentary? That's typically a useless question, since pretty much every storyteller and dramatist since, appropriately, the time of ancient Greece and maybe before then has known that the ending is only part of a story. There are so many angles from which to view this team, not to mention all of the people and personalities involved in its unexpected victory, so the most disappointing thing about this telling of that story is how the question of the movie's point remains.

Marks has access to the 2004 team's coach Otto Rehhagel (as well as an assistant coach and the chief administrator of the club at the time) and several of its players, who sit comfortably in front of the camera and look quite thrilled to have the chance to reminisce about such a moment of personal, professional, and national triumph. Either their memories are a little foggy from the in-the-moment excitement of it all or Marks doesn't exactly have a series of probing questions for his subjects, because they offer nothing we can't infer or gather from the archival footage and the highlight reels of the various matches.

It's clear there's something amiss here when Rehhagel, who was offered the coaching job in Greece when he was passed up for his native Germany's national team, discusses strategy about as much as his first arrival at the airport in Athens. The players recount the general flow of games and specific moments in certain matches, and it's all unnecessary and redundant, because Marks has at least put together a pretty fine, if concise, series of montages to show us those matches and moments.

As for a sense of the dynamics of and individuals on the team, the most details we receive is from then-assistant coach Ioannis Topalidis, who explains how he had to translate his German boss' words and lessen Rehhagel's tone to connect with the players. The controversy surrounding the team's strategy is mentioned and dismissed so quickly that one wonders why the subject even is raised.

Obviously, it's difficult not to feel a bit inspired as victory approaches and a previously disinterested country rallies around their team. Such feelings are just part of the reason people want to hear these stories, and King Otto clearly doesn't care about the other parts.

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