FILMandMOVIEmaking.com

2 stars **

So here’s what the directors and writers did; they sat around a large table with lots of movie industry (but not football) people. They spent hours writing down ideas on little pieces of paper. Each idea contained a scene or incident that ‘could’ happen during a movie about a boy that grows up finding out he has a great football talent. The ‘goal’ of the film is to get him to move from point A to Point Z where he’s a professional footballer, forgetting anything about character arc.

The vital move next was to add any football cliché you might conjure up to any real life cliché you could imagine of a boy moving from a poor environment to a very rich one. Finally, you need to blend in all of the standard Hollywood movie plans to ensure that Blake Snyder’s laws of screenwriting for Hollywood hits, was applied.

Any normal team would now sift through the pile of ideas and place together a plan for the movie, discarding papers that won’t fit and reducing the plot to a manageable and believable script. Unfortunately, this team decided to keep everything in, lock stock and barrel.

I laughed so much when it wasn’t supposed to be a comedy and said ‘I don’t believe it’ so many times as we guessed this movie’s plot before each scene arrived. We were correct nearly every time in planning the film’s next move.

Incredibly, two of the four writers were the genius team of Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. I can only guess they added the good parts of the script!

Taking a boy from the poor end of Mexico, breaking into the USA and then being spotted by a former scout from Newcastle United in England, failing his trial, but getting asked back for another trial before breaking through to the first team, would have been so much better if they’d talked to some football people. Perhaps they did, but they needed to get past basic errors. For example, you can’t sign a player that late in the season. With only four games to go and the need to win them all, you couldn’t add to your English Premier league squad past January. These games would be in mid April. You can’t just become an Agent to a player. FIFA (the governing body) UEFA and the English FA have strict rules about who can become an agent. Not anyone can and you can’t do it in an afternoon.

I could go on, but to avoid cliché movie reviews, I’ll say that the camera work, moving between the actors and the professional footballers, was excellent. You couldn’t see the breaks, it was so seamless. In this area, this film beats all previous football movies.

I felt sorry for the superb Anna Friel. You would have thought she’d have learnt about being the tag along wife after her spell with Nic Leeson, so a footballer is the next best bet. She must have looked at the script wondered if the lines were really expected to be read out loud. Then a quick look at her pay check would have convinced her to actually repeat the lines.

The Paul Gascoigne/ George Best character was a perfect foil to the clean, good living Mexican. Disaster was always only a few feet away. However, we all know that in movie-street, disaster is always followed by success.

I would guess David Beckham won’t be taking up acting after his small part in this movie, but his bank balance would have improved considerably.

Unbelievably, this is still one of the best football films of all time even though it’s two hours long, despite the plot, the clichés and the inevitable ending. I mean, apart from Manchester United, who scores incredible goals in the last few seconds to win matches?

There’s some people on the pitch, they think it’s all over… but no, Goal 2 and 3 will follow.

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