Four stars****

How is it possible to watch a movie with little story, hardly any plot and yet want it to go on for another hour after its 130 minutes were over?

The answer hides within the incredible Beatles’ songs. Actors Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs. Martin Luther McCoy and T. V. Carpio bring their own skills to the well known Beatles’ songs. Dana Fuchs brings more life out of Helter Skelter and Why Don’t We Do It In The Road than the Beatles originally envisaged. Evan Rachel Wood is selected for songs that match her voice. Jim Strugess nails everything except Revolution, where it’s more the lack of punch to the music rather than his vocal performance that lets it down. I also took exception to Eddie Izzard’s Mr Kite, but he did make it fun rather than sing-able.

31 great Beatles songs and one almost not known rendition of Hold Me Tight take us on a ride where we might want to compare the songs to the originals, but we find ourselves marveling at how well crafted the lyrics are to the movie we’re watching. Dick Clement and Iain La Frenais have writer’s track records that exceed most people and while it’s obvious they made the story fit the Beatles’ lyrics, they still had to make it all glide together. Using the character names from Beatles’ songs was a nice touch, but whatever happened to Rita or did I miss the meter maid?

They’ve chosen to take us on a ride through the late sixties and early seventies in both England the US. They’ve kept the story simple and the dialogue easy to make the links through the music of the Beatles’ songs. They work strongly on the peace and war movements of those times, but don’t ram it down our throats.

The revenue didn’t make enough to cover the budget, but that may be down to the marketing as back in 2007 the movie and CD didn’t make many marketing waves.

The producers added Bono, Eddie Izzard and Salma Hayek to the mix, but their short visits were not enough to make their own fans run to buy tickets again and again.

The CD will be in my car for the next few weeks. Even though no-one can better the Beatles originals, this selection have been tastefully re-produced to avoid clashing with the songs we all know and love.

At least sympathy didn’t get Joe Cocker to modify his previous Beatles’ hit here, but to give him different songs was a better touch of emphasis to the songs performed.

A change of director and the loss of the brilliance of writing team Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais proved the franchise didn’t learn from Goal 1. To have the player move to Real Madrid in Spain, where his long lost mother just happens to live, is stretching believability too far.

The mistakes still abound. There’s no recognition of the Gavin Harris character moving to Real Madrid, especially when he looked all through with his previous club and heading downwards in his career, rather than on a high. The lead actor and Anna Friel got engaged, but without mentioning it. You’d think the plan to leave out these matters would leave a movie with a crisp screenplay. Alas, still every cliché you’ve forgotten comes back into play.

The good news is that the brilliant football footage still shines through. The games look so realistic that you do believe the actors played at Real Madrid’s stadium. You’ll just to put up with players running with the ball, but you either only see the feet with the ball or the body moving without the feet or ball. You can’t have it both ways unless you’re a professional footballer who becomes an actor. Apart from Eric Cantona and Vinne Jones, the list grows short.

The Blake Snyder action plan for a successful Hollywood movie is still showing through, leaving your need for a sick bag or two, close at hand. The lines are so embarrassing that the German team manager looks like he’s going to run away each time he speaks.

This movie isn’t as good as the first, but it does move the story along through obvious highs and lows and leads us directly to the third in the set.

We all know the script by now, guessing it seconds before the actors say the lines. We even guessed that he wouldn’t run over his little unknown brother who runs out in front of a Ferrari doing around 100mph.

My goodness, in Goal 3 they’ll have him decide between representing his home countries of Mexico and The United States. He’ll choose Mexico and he’ll go on to score the winning goal in the World Cup final. In Goal 4, he’ll transfer to a team on the moon, win the first league championship there, break two legs and still play on for ninety minutes to score the winning goal against the Daleks. I know, it’ll never happen, but it did in Goal 1 and Goal 2.

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.