NEXT GOAL WINS (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Next Goal Wins, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

With Next Goal Wins, co-writer/director Taika Waititi takes the formula of the underdog sports story and adds a lot of jokes. They're often good jokes, for sure, especially since the underdogs here are as low as a group of athletes can get in their particular sport.

They're the national soccer—or football, for everyone outside of the United States—team of American Samoa, which has never won a match, is ranked at the very bottom of national teams around the world, and were on the wrong side of the worst defeat in the history of international soccer. The score of that 2001 match looked more like the final of an American football game, with Australia scoring 31 goals and American Samoa going scoreless.

All of this information is presented by Waititi himself, playing a local priest, in a cheeky prologue that pretty much sets the tone of this narrative in stone. There are outlying moments, to be sure, such as one relationship that opens up a closed mind and a halftime speech at the Big Game that's as unsurprising as it is emotionally manipulative. When a filmmaker turns just about everything into a joke, it's only that much easier to notice when we're being toyed with in any other way.

That's probably the most obvious shortcoming of this dramatization of a true-life story (previously covered in documentary form in 2014, although that British production wasn't so widely released for an international audience to see it—or even know about its existence until now). We can tell Waititi is pulling a fast one on us, telling a purely formulaic and predictable story but doing so in such a manner that lets us know he's aware of that fact. The end result doesn't feel particularly subversive or revolutionary, though.

It feels more as if the filmmaker is almost too timid to admit his real intentions or to embrace the fact that this story might actually be inspirational on its own merits. Is Waititi just worried that his movie might come across as cheesy if he approaches it with any degree of seriousness or sincerity? If a story is good—as this one clearly is and remains visible even through the filmmaker's tongue-in-cheek tactics—and told well, why be concerned about how the cynical and skeptical might respond to it? The best inspirational tales can make even the hardest of hearts shatter.

Instead, Waititi and co-screenwriter Iain Morris go out of their way to deflect from any accusations that they might care about this story. After being introduced to the American Samoa team's disastrous past, the story proper begins in 2011, with disgraced soccer coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) being fired from a U.S. team by his estranged wife Gail (Elisabeth Moss) and boss (played by Will Arnett), who also happens to be Gail's new boyfriend, and basically ordered to begin coaching the American Samoa squad.

There's a genuinely funny joke of Thomas being given a presentation about and going through the stages of grief during his canning, but that late scene in which the coach gives his Big Speech at the Big Game puts it in a context that just makes everyone in that scene seem unnecessarily cruel. That's another issue of transforming everything into a gag, because ideas such as emotional logic and treating characters as actual people, with histories that exist before some third-act revelation, go out the window.

Anyway, Thomas' new team is a shambles, with the best players having left in disgrace and the new ones potentially being even worse. Thomas—who has anger issues that apparently no one is curious about, despite how much research everyone in town does on him—quickly grows impatient with the squad, since none of the players seems interested in listening to or learning from him. He gains a new perspective from the club's president Tavita (Oscar Kightley), who attempts not-so-subliminal messaging to make him stay, and squad member Jaiyah (Kaimana), a transgender woman whom everyone on the team but Thomas accepts—until she teaches him a thing or two about accepting people, even struggling athletes, on their own terms.

If some of this does sound a bit on the nose, it is, but that is mostly because Waititi has to make it so—again, on account of how consistently the material is treated with a distancing level of humor. We never get to know individual members of the team, apart from Jaiyah and some trivial details about a few others, so any important thematic point they might have to make or display here is hammered hard when it arrives.

Up until then, the story follows all of the familiar beats, too, with training montages of the team getting—or, as joke early on, not getting—better, Thomas battling with demons that are transparently obvious despite how much the script tries to hide the cause, and the high stakes of a Big Game where the most significant moments are played by way of a series of anticlimactic flashbacks. For a movie that clearly wants to rise above or distance itself from a formulaic approach, Next Goal Wins certainly embraces it when convenient, which makes the whole endeavor feel a bit hypocritical, too.

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