Taika Waititi’s soccer drama Next Goal Wins shoots for thrills and fails to score
This review of Next Goal Wins comes from the film’s premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be released in November.
Sports dramas are a surefire way to please a crowd. There are few things as primed for comfort viewing, excitement, and last-minute twists as a movie or TV show revolving around a sport. The whole genre is built around the opportunity for rousing speeches, intense montages, feats of athleticism, and cathartic triumph. And sports are cross-cultural enough to offer some universal storytelling beats while staying distinctive for every community and every sport. It’s as true for the story of women’s baseball in A League of Their Own as it is for the high school volleyball anime Haikyu!!, with its exhilarating microcosm of friendship and perseverance.
Enter Thor: Ragnarok director and Our Flag Means Death star Taika Waititi, known for his crowd-pleasing comedies where lovable misfit characters endure hardships with a quirky sense of humor. Waititi’s long-awaited soccer movie Next Goal Wins, a time capsule buried pre-COVID (it wrapped production in January 2020), includes every beat of a standard underdog sports story, told with Waititi’s signature New Zealand style of humor. It features zero surprises, but the jokes mostly land, and the characters are charming. The problem is that the film never really conveys any of the reasons people care about soccer.
The story follows the mostly true story of the American Samoa football team, record-holders for one of the worst soccer losses in history. In the qualifiers for the 2002 World Cup, they lost to Australia 31-0. Then they attempted a comeback under Dutch American coach Thomas Rongen (played in this movie by Michael Fassbender,
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