Next Goal Wins

Next Goal Wins is the true-ish story of the American Samoan soccer team, and their great dream of finally scoring their first goal ever in the entire history of American Samoan soccer on the international level.

I’ve mentioned this before, but in addition to the movie Air, a film that I flat out refuse to see, not just because it looks like a Saturday Night Live parody of Oscar bait films, which is made even worse by the fact that it’s very much not, but also because of Affleck’s stupid hair in the film, which is beyond words fucking awful, and I don’t care if it’s historically accurate, it’s fucking awful, and I won’t support that kind of shit…

But I digress…

Back to my original point, in addition to the movie Air, I also normally avoid a handful of specific kinds of films sight unseen…

1. Christian mythology/glorification stories, especially when they’re about colonizing missionaries “heroically” invading somewhere in order to spread the “good” word.

2. Bio-pics in general, but most especially the ones about the tortured and tumultuous history of an artistic/musical genius.

3. Any film about some depressed white guy going though his boring mid-life crisis, and the manic pixie dream girl who teaches him to live again.

4. Oscar bait films about a character struggling with their addiction.

And finally… 5. The plucky “loser sports team does good” movies, whether it’s the comedic or dramatic versions of that story.

This isn’t always true, of course. There’s more than a few films from these particular genres that I love… like Noah, or Purple Rain, or The Professional, or Trainspotting, for example. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Those few films aside, I normally find these particular types of movies to be total ass, and I’m just not interested in their shit.

That having been said, even though Next Goal Wins is a “loser sports team does good” story, I gave it a shot, and I was really hoping that it would end up being counted amongst the handful of exceptions to my rule.

Spoiler… it wasn’t.

A mix of Cool Runnings (where a white guy coaches a nonwhite sports team in another country), Bad News Bears (where a jerk finds redemption while coaching some weirdos), and a little bit of Hoosiers (where a small economically depressed community rallies around a local sports team), with a healthy dash of such “big fish suddenly finding themselves in a very small pond” types like Doc Hollywood, My Cousin Vinnie, or Northern Exposure, and on and on and on, in the end, Next Goal Wins is just going through the expected motions, all while lacking any heart, mostly because the story doesn’t earn any.

It feels a little strange to accuse a film of being overly “formulaic” when it’s based on actual events, but… here we are.

Based on the real life events from 2014, this is the true-ish story of coach Thomas Rongen, sent to American Samoa as a sort of exile, after personal issues send him into a spiral, to train the U.S. territory’s team to qualify for the FIFA World Cup. A decade before, this team suffered the worst loss in World Cup history, setting an actual world record for getting absolutely fucking whalloped in a match against Australia to the tune of 31 to nothing. Even if you know almost nothing about soccer—and I certainly know almost nothing—losing by thirty one points is such an unfathomable amount to lose by, such an excruiatingly humiliating defeat, it’s possible America Samoa might have been less publicly embarassed if they had simply not shown up, and instead, had stayed home and ethusiastically took up pickle-ball, and then walked around town while wearing tshirts like this…

I mean, it’s possible that this would have been less embarrassing...

Maybe not. It’d be close, is what I’m saying.

I’m a big fan of Taika Waititi. Eagle vs Shark, Boy, What We Do In The Shadows (the film and the TV show), Hunt for the Wilderpeople, his Thor films, the episode of The Mandalorian he directed, Our Flag Means Death, Jojo Rabbit… he’s a talented writer and director, and I’m a fan of his particular brand of humor and heart.

But here? It’s just so rote and half-baked.

The basic idea is that the coach is a huge dickhead, and that the lovely people of American Somoa are not, and together they learn to a little bit about each other… and themeslves, all because of soccer.

But from Taika mugging for the camera, all while doing his Korg voice, as a fourth-wall-breaking local priest who explains that this is a slightly embellished true story, to the arrival of the dickhead coach, and then following his at least hugely inconsiderate, if not slightly racist, misadventures in a foreign culture as he gets to know the quirky team of oddballs, ultimately leading them to a shared realization more valuable than the team scoring their oh-so-hoped-for first goal ever on the international level… it’s all as step by obvious step as it sounds.

But that’s just what these movies are, right? They can’t help but be what they are, and to do what they’re supposed to do, right? It’s not fair to ding a story for being exactly the kind of story that it’s supposed to be, right?

Sure, but that’s just it, that’s not the problem here. At least, not the main problem. The problem is that other than the coach, everyone else is barely a character. The film tells us who they all are, and where they come from, but it’s just coloring, as the film is only concerned with using the game, and that push for that first goal, as a vehicle for the coach to come to some personal realizations, and to overcome the tragedies that brought him to this point in his life.

The whole point of the film is that the white guy is made better, all by helping to make the brown people he lives among be better at his favorite sport.

Which… kinda sucks.

A “White Savior” narrative is a sadly all too common cinematic trope in which the central white character somehow rescues the more minor non-white characters from the unfortunate circumstances they’re stuck in, circumstances which are usually a direct result of them having been born not white. Think Dances With Wolves. Think The Blind Side. Think The Last Samurai. Think Green Book. Think Avatar. Obviously, Waititi is aware that he’s walking this line, as he has the indigenous characters joke about the new coach being a white savior, but just because they’re aware of it, that doesn’t mean the film does anything at all to subvert the trope.

Because it doesn’t.

On top of that, the coach is such an incredible dickhead too. Usually, like in Rom-Coms, these kinds of film have one big scene, the set-back, which usually happens at about the 2'/3rds time-mark, where the drunk asshole coach so completely lets down his team of quirky oddballs that it seems like maybe all of their hopes are now dashed, that the team is no more, and that everyone is walking away an even sadder loser than they were at the start of the film, but Next Goal Wins has at least three of these kind of scenes! At least that many! Scenes where the coach melts down for one reason or another and quits, only to have one of the lovely indigenious locals of America Somoa seek him out to have a heart to heart with him, and bring him back to fold, where all is forgiven. It’s tedious. Especially since the coach is so generally unpleasant during the film. After awhile, you start to wonder "Are these people angels? Why would they put up with this shit?" or maybe, "God damn, maybe coach would be better off if somebody were to just kick his ass a bit…”

Worst of all, the coach’s redemption is mostly viewed through the lens of his relationship with one of the main players, Jaiyah Saelua. Jaiyah is a fa'afafine. The Faʻafafine are people who identify themselves as having a third gender or non-binary role in Samoa, American Samoa, and the Samoan diaspora. Like everyone in the story, Jaiyah is based on a real person who actually played for the American Samoa national team at the time, who then eventually transitioned to female, and was the first openly non-gender binary player to compete in a FIFA qualifying match.

Otherwise known as the generally more interesting character that the story maybe should’ve focused on instead of the typical drunken jerk of a white coach…

Instead, the coach deadnames Jaiyah at one point, which the film uses as a way of highlighting how depressed he is, and then has Jaiyah be the one to forgive and forget, extending an olive branch that leads to them bonding over a love of the game, paving the way for the big reveal of the reason for why the coach is such a dickhead in the first place, which is supposed to make it okay for us to forgive him being such a huge dickhead, causing us all to embrace the film’s cheesey and simplistic central message of “Be Happy,” a bit of hippy-dippy nonsense more at home as tshirt fodder from the gift shop of some Wealthy Playground Resort built on the beach of an economically depressed area. “Be Happy.” And it’s all done with the additional message that “hey, it’s okay to like this transgender, even though they’re weird, because they like sports, because through the magic of sports, we can see that they’re almost just like us.” It’s a shockingly tone-deaf and shitty way of using what is already an outdated plot point in a boring sub-genre of film. I can’t tell if it was on purpose, or just ignorance, but either way, I honestly thought Waititi would’ve known better.

Disappointing.

In a world where Ted Lasso exists, there’s no reason to watch Next Goal Wins.