Already haemorrhaging the goodwill he’s received since he arrived in Hollywood, it’s not a good idea for Taika Waititi to start his new movie by appearing as a cartoonish self-parody to tell the audience that this story of the fortunes of an American Samoan football team was mostly true “with a few embellishments”. Not great to come right out and discourage a certain degree of investment -not that it would have been there anyway- but still. It reads as incredibly cynical, which sadly is also how Next Goal Wins, Waititi’s attempt at an inspiring sports movie, comes across as well.
This his second passion project “for me” film since he joined up with Marvel, and compared to Jojo Rabbit it’s shocking just how little care and enthusiasm comes across on screen. It is a nice story, very traditionally inspiring; but quite hollow too, and Waititi seems to think he can bypass that with his typical sensibility of humour -but it’s a style that quite notably has limitations to its charms, as Thor: Love and Thunder glaringly proved. This movie is far less obnoxious than that one but it is just as thematically stale. And a part of that might be due to where Waititi puts the focus.
Thomas Rongen is the white Dutch-American coach played by Michael Fassbender strong-armed after a series of career setbacks into coaching this team in the middle of the South Pacific. He is depressed and separated, unduly harsh and impatient with this new extremely laid-back and undisciplined team, who he will of course learn to love over the span of the movie. A more generic sports movie premise you’d be hard-pressed to find. Even the fish-out-of-water angle for this kind of movie has been done to death, and Waititi offers so little in terms of a fresh perspective or storytelling device –minus his own occasionally intrusive narration.
The only mark of distinction he brings, and the only one he seems to have left, is his trademark mildly-detached idiosyncratic comedic voice, applied to just about all of the supporting cast though most prominently Thomas’s foil Tavita (Oscar Kightley), the American Samoan Football Association’s deadpan President who spends the first several scenes with a bunch of boobs drawn on his face as part of a lost bet (it’s a very laboured joke that it’s stunning anyone thought was funny enough to be dragged on as far into the movie as it was). The movie is full of these kinds of strained jokes, pithy comic observations, and dull witticisms that could have been thought up by Waititi on a lazy afternoon. And in a way it flattens the American Samoans, their character and culture under Waititi’s umbrella of humour. There’s a scene where Rachel House (always a staple for Waititi) comes up to Thomas in disguise as some local ancestral spirit to inspire him, her husband Tavita later commenting it’s just what white people expect. The irony is that Waititi too is playing into a mere base idea of South Pacific island culture more than anything specific. Not until the last act do we even hear the football team chant in their own language. The only specific Samoan concept that comes up before is fa’afafine -in relation to one character specifically, the character who the film ought to have been centred around.
By far the most compelling figure in this whole story, whether Waititi’s version or the real one, is Jaiyah Saelua, the first non-binary and transgender player to compete in a FIFA World Cup qualifier. Here she is played by Kaimana in the one really invested performance of the film. Among this team of extreme underdogs, she is a very potent avatar -and Waititi clearly realizes this enough to put her story ahead of the other players (none of whom are granted much character of their own), yet not so much that he makes it her story. Waititi has consciously aligned himself in recent years with LGBTQ representation -he was adamant about a confirmed bisexual character in Thor: Love and Thunder (which as in any Marvel movie was severely underwhelming), and has of course attached himself prominently as producer and co-lead of queer pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death. Which is why it’s troubling that his trans representation in this movie is so stunted and awkward; from framing Jaiyah’s gender identity from the vantage point of Thomas’s initial transphobia (thus making it on at least a small level about his learning to not be a bigot) to the way that Jaiyah is frequently written to put the team and their mutual goals ahead of her gender confirmation, apologizing to the coach for a completely justified angry outburst at his dead-naming her and going off her hormones ahead of the qualifying match out of some belief it would help the team. On this latter point, it is of course insultingly Coach Thomas who inspires her to be her true self.
Really though, it’s just one of several beats that puts this movie rather embarrassingly behind the times. It plays several antiquated sports movie tropes, doing nothing new with them, apart from lampshading how most of Thomas’ big encouraging speech (which comes mere minutes after a tantrum about how badly they’re playing) is ripped directly from Any Given Sunday. This scene also comes with the rather ill-timed reveal of Thomas’s personal tragedy –otherwise set up actually in a fairly interesting way. Yet Thomas’s relationship to his separated wife (Elisabeth Moss) and her new husband (Will Arnett) –a former mutual co-worker- is still thinly derivative. There is a training montage set to Tears for Fears, and yes, the climax does play out with dramatic slow-building tension –at least until it’s interrupted by another bit, where the end of the game is relayed in the past tense, that is way less clever than Waititi thinks it is. I suppose it matches the low-energy stakes of the film and its general tone of not really caring one way or the other. The objective of this team is simply to score one goal, so pathetic is their track record, and that would be enough. And it would be hard to drum up enthusiasm in an audience for something so trivial without the attitude given off by the team as a monolith suggesting they would be pretty chill regardless. It’s nice as a sentiment, but makes for really poor drama. There is no reason for the audience to care about the outcome of this movie –Waititi plainly doesn’t.
Waititi’s cruise control approach wouldn’t necessarily be unexpected on a Marvel product, but on Next Goal Wins –possibly the blandest film he’s ever made- it speaks to an apparent ebb in that creative spark once responsible for delightfully original ideas like What We Do in the Shadows or Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Perhaps it speaks also to a certain personal cockiness as well in the singular reputation he has acquired for himself in Hollywood. Waititi is a talented filmmaker and there’s no reason Next Goal Wins shouldn’t have been an entertaining movie. But if this is all he’s doing even with those blank checks he’s been getting, maybe it’s best he step away from filmmaking for a while.
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