Next Goal Wins Review: Dead Ball

One can’t say that writer-director Taika Waititi doesn’t do an efficient job at telling us just what kind of experience Next Goal Wins is going to be right from the outset. After all the studio logos, the very first image we see is of Taika himself, playing an American Samoan priest, explains to the audience the tale of the most embarrassing defeat ever to occur on a soccer pitch: a match from April 11, 2001 when Australia beat American Samoa 31-0.

The footage of that match starts both Waititi’s film and the 2014 documentary of the same name by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison that it’s based on. And it’s a perfect way to kick-start a movie about a bunch of loveable losers struggling for the meager goal of scoring a single point in literally any game. The cherry on top of it all is the darkly hilarious moment when American Samoa’s goalie, Nicky Salapu, flops over in a near-fetal position after the game.

But while Brett and Jamison understood that the footage speaks for itself, Taika injects himself and some quirky narration into the footage, which adds nothing but an extra kick while the poor bastards are down. This, as it turns out, is the running motif of Next Goal Wins: taking a story that already has enough tragic comedy all its own and actively adding irritants to it.

The true story in question, and the subject of the documentary, is that, in 2014, the American Samoan team hires former U.S. men’s soccer coach Thomas Rongen to help whip the players into shape. And before any “white savior” alarms are set off, Brett and Jamison’s film becomes less about a white guy showing brown people how to play soccer than it is about Rongen and the team working in tandem trying to translate Samoan culture to the soccer pitch. There’s still some of that in Waititi’s film, but it’s drowned out by the tired sports movie tropes, dated stereotypes, and xenophobic jokes that drop a mile a minute, most of them landing with a thud.

Rongen comes across in the documentary as an ornery but genuinely empathetic sort of guy. It’s not long after his first week of training the team that his curiosity more than his expertise leads the way in how he forges a bond with the players. Waititi’s film, on the other hand, turns Rongen (Michael Fassbender) into a hot-headed Gordon Ramsey-esque blowhard. While, of course, the arc of the film eventually bends him where he needs to go, it’s a long, grating road getting there, in which the generally excellent and game cast of Indigenous actors are mostly affably clueless props in Rongen’s culture-shocked evolution toward being a better person.

Nowhere is this more pronounced and borderline insulting than in the film’s portrayal of Jaiyah Saelua. Her story, as the first trans person to compete in a World Cup qualifier, could probably support a film all on its own. Despite an unassailable performance from newcomer Kaimana, her arc is reduced to fictionalized tension, being deadnamed in a heated moment on the field, forgiving Fassbender’s Rongen for it shortly after, and—despite being made team captain—largely being sidelined until Rongen can come to a catharsis about his own personal tragedy.

The common denominator in the film’s faults is Waititi. His hallmark frivolous sense of humor clashes with the heartwarming emotions at play, the traditional demands of the genre, and the far more engaging emotional honesty of the real story. The stars align for the film only once, in a sequence where four different narrators tell their families about the climactic game against Tonga. Otherwise, Next Goal Wins feels like five different films, all of them failing to coalesce in an effective way because every 30 seconds the script thinks it has to crack wise.