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SHORT REVIEW (ESSAY-LENGTH VERSION BELOW)
Los Angeles, the present. Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) works in a Chinese restaurant and helps out his father's gardening business, but dreams of using his brilliant footballing skills to become a 'soccer' star. He gets his chance when a British talent-scout (Stephen Dillane) spots him and recommends him to top English side Newcastle United. Santiago must travel halfway around the world if he's to fulfil his ambitions - but when he arrives in rainy Britain, he realises that he still has a very long way to go...
Despite the glamorous Mexican/LA settings at the beginning, Goal!'s cliche-compendium plot wouldn't look out of place in any old-school football annual: Ruy of the Rovers, if you like. Corn and sentimentality are very much the order of the day, but the cobwebbed cliches are driven home with such Rooney-like conviction that the picture may well find a few admirers beyond its target audience of footy-mad kids aged between 5 and 15.
With some heavyweight thesps involved (Dillane, Miriam Colon, Gary Lewis, Frances Barber, Allesandro Nivola) alongside nervous-looking real-life talent like Alan Shearer, David Beckham, Raul and Zinedine Zidane, Goal! isn't at all unenjoyable if taken on its own limited terms. This means overlooking Cannon's serviceable-at-best direction and the intrusive contributions in the departments of score and cinematography. It also probably isn't a good idea to linger on the fact that the picture's commercial "partnerships" mean this is really little more than an extended, elaborate advert for FIFA and Adidas.
Neil Young
19th September, 2005
GOAL! : [5/10] : USA (US-UK) 2005 : Danny CANNON : 118 mins
seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 18th September 2005 - regional premiere ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALL DAY I DREAM ABOUT SOCCER
an essay-length review of Danny Cannon's Goal!
by Neil Young
In the wake of Cinderella Man, here comes another shamelessly rickety compendium of rags-to-riches sporting cliches - one which, the more you know about it, the dodgier it gets. Goal! is about football rather than boxing, and doesn't claim to be based on a true story - so thus can't be accused (unlike Ron Howard's travesty) of libelling the dead. The running-time is almost half an hour shorter, which is a major blessing, and Cannon's return to big-screen features after his TV sojourn with CSI Crime Scene Investigation will at least manage to satisfy the picture's main target audience. This would appear to be impressionable teenage and sub-teenage lads, especially those sharing the aspirations of our 'soccer'-mad hero Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker).
As the opening titles appear we see a very young Santiago kicking a ball about in a sun-dappled Mexican backwater - before he is whisked across the border one night by his family, narrowly evading the clutches of US immigration patrols. Ten years later, his mother has long sinced walked out and the adult Santiago is working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant when he isn't helping out his stern father Hernan (Tony Plana) with his gardening business. But his football talents have clearly blossomed in the intervening decade, and he's spotted by a small-time football scout-cum-agent, ex-pro Glenn Foy (Stephen Dillane). Glenn uses his connections to secure Santiago a trial with far-off English premiership club Newcastle United, managed by the Arsene-Wengerishly professorial Erik Dornhelm (Marcel Iures). In finest Billy Elliot style, Papa is dead-against the move; his doting grandmother (Miriam Colon) encourages Santiago to "follow his dreams." What's a young man to do?
Given this opening, even the most casual moviegoer should be able to fill in the remaining blanks of a clunky route-one screenplay credited to two separate sets of writers. These are Adrian Butchart and Mike Jefferies (a Liverpool fan and one-time prospective club-takeover-entrepreneur, who came up with the original story idea), and veteran duo Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Clement and La Frenais have been based in Los Angeles for some years but are still (arguably) best known in the UK for Newcastle-flavoured sitcoms such as The Likely Lads and Auf Wiedersehen Pet, and were presumably drafted in to "Geordie up" proceedings - which mostly consists of colourful locals informing the overpaid Magpie stars that they're "shite!"
What the foursome have come up with wouldn't, despite the glamorous Mexican/LA touches, look out of place in any old-school football annual: Ruy of the Rovers, if you like. Corn and sentimentality are very much the order of the day, but the cobwebbed cliches are driven home with such Rooney-like conviction that Goal! isn't at all unenjoyable, taken on its own limited terms. This means having to forgive Graeme Revell's obtrusive score and Michael Barrett's cinematography which is, notwithstanding some breathtaking helicopter shots of Tyneside, rather crudely slick: Los Angeles is steeped in a permanent, honeyed sepia glow, Newcastle in a cobalt murk; and in both settings Barrett has seemingly never found a sky that wouldn't be "improved" with the use of a lens-filter, or a room that he can resist plunging into X-Files-like shadow.
Cannon's direction is, similarly, functional at best - along with editor Chris Dickens, he does a decent enough job with the crucial match-day footage, and marshals OK performances from a cast that's really several cuts above what this material deserves: Puerto Rican-born Colon, for example, is a living-legend of Latin American cinema. Goal! doesn't exactly stretch the talents of Dillane or Frances Barber, the latter particularly ill-served by a nothing role as the vampy mother of Santiago's nurse girlfriend Roz (Anna Friel, sporting a serviceable Geordie accent).
Becker, meanwhile, makes for a reasonably engaging hero, managing to convince off-field as well as on - despite (or perhaps because) of the fact he's rather older than the character he plays. Santiago isn't the most nuanced or complex of protagonists, however: there's a tantalisingly brief mention of his time as a gang-member (he still sports a gang tattoo), but otherwise he's a very ordinary lad who happens to have a very extraordinary and lucrative talent.
Ah, yes - the money. Goal! will no doubt be held up by many commentators as an all-too-accurate mirror of all that's wrong with football, a sport that became a business decades ago and then, more recently, a global industry. The result: too much money swilling around, too many noses in too many troughs. Goal! makes no bones about the fact that it is heavily 'supported' by megabucks 'partners' including sportswear giant Adidas and football's governing body FIFA (who were also behind the identically-titled World Cup documentary Goal! back in 1966).
This is why Santiago makes his way to (Adidas-sponsored) Newcastle rather than Jefferies' own beloved (Reebok-sponsored), and why (Adidas-sponsored) Real Madrid are the focus of the currently-in-production Goal! 2 (with Goal! 3 set for 2007). In an age where product placement and commercial 'partnerships' are the Hollywood norm, there's perhaps nothing too extraordinary about this - but what we effectively have here isn't really so much a film, or even a trilogy, as a vastly elaborate series of advertisements designed to spread the Adidas brand and to further the dominance of football on the world stage.
Which is presumably why (relative) maverick Michael Winterbottom exited the project not long after production had begun. As was widely reported in the trade press at the time, this was a troubled period, which also saw the departure of Diego Luna (cast as Santiago when Gael Garcia Bernal declined the job), James Nesbitt (Glenn) and Stellan Skarsgard (as Dornholm). Speaking of Skarsgard, can it really be coincidental that, despite the fact that (Romanian) Iures' character is clearly referred to at one stage as 'German', his accent is emphatically Swedish? Close your eyes and it's Escape To Victory star Max Von Sydow imparting the intricacies of the 'Beautiful Game' - just one of the factors that makes Iures' contribution the most consistently interesting and expert aspects of what's otherwise a very uneven enterprise.
"Creative differences" were cited re Winterbottom's sayonara, which makes sense when you hear producer Matt Barrelle proudly proclaiming that "we try to work out films from the point of what the [sponsorship] market would demand, and not the other way round, which is the norm in the film industry." So this is the sport in an Adidas/FIFA-approved light: no drugs, very little sex, no swearing (!), the odd bit of cheeky-bad-boy behaviour here and there (Alessandro Nivola, amusing in a very badly-written role as hard-living, ludicrously capricious Cockney striker Gavin Harris) but fundamentally a decent and wholesome endeavour, a vehicle for the world's dreams, no less.
And it's a bit rich for a film largely paid for and promoted by Adidas and FIFA (their website speaks glowingly of the Disney corporation ensuring "maximum market penetration") to glorify the "little man" agent in the form of the idealistic, sensible Glenn, in contrast to the shark-like, amoral London-based Barry (Sean Pertwee), when anyone with the barest knowledge of the football world knows that in reality it's the Barrys who are firmly in charge of proceedings, with the Glens barely getting a look-in.
The result: players earning more in a week than their most of their fans will earn in a year, and as fine a microcosm of brute-capitalism-gone-bad as you could ever wish to see. The smug, smirking face of this world even gets a cameo in Goal!, when David Beckham congratulates Santiago in a London bar following his debut against (Adidas-sponsored) Fulham. 'Becks', Barry informs the star-struck Santiago, is in town with his team-mates Raul and Zinedine Zidane - "to film an ad." Just like Becker, in fact...
Neil Young
19th September, 2005
GOAL! : [5/10] : USA (US-UK) 2005 : Danny CANNON : 118 mins
seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 18th September 2005 - regional premiere
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