Next Goal Wins opens in theaters November 17. This review was based on a screening at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
An early scene in Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins depicts a half-hearted Siva Tau – a Samoan ceremonial dance similar to the Māori Haka – performed before a soccer game. Along with footage of American Samoa’s historic 31-0 World Cup qualifier defeat to Australia in 2001, the lethargically performed dance is meant to symbolize the movie’s starting point: the story of the worst team in the world, and how a reluctant new coach turned things around. However, the major problem with Next Goal Wins is that it never builds enough momentum or passion. Throughout its runtime, and by the end, it feels just as languid as those initial steps.
Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, Waititi’s long-delayed sports dramedy – it was shot in 2019, before Thor: Love and Thunder or reshoots necessitated by one-time co-star Armie Hammer’s public fall from grace (he’s replaced in the final cut by Will Arnett) – truncates its story to frustrating degrees, and hits very few of its comedic or dramatic targets along the way. Next Goal Wins is filled with dead air: When the jokes aren’t mere references, they’re punchlines without real setups, and the inspirational high-notes it aspires to are beyond its range.
Michael Fassbender plays short-tempered Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen who, after being forced to take an impossible job no one wants, slowly learns to become a part of the American Samoan team and culture en route to the 2014 World Cup qualifiers. However, there’s little getting to know either Rongen or any of the players, who are – for the most part – portrayed as an interchangeable mass. The one exception is star center back Jaiyah Saelua (played by nonbinary actor Kaimana), a faʻafafine, or “third gender” person in Soamoan culture, whose male assignment at birth allows her to play for the men’s team within FIFA’s legal parameters. That’s not to say that Next Goal Wins is particularly concerned with her psychology, which it often hand-waves in order to usher along the plot, at the cost of oversimplifying Jaiyah’s life. That she takes estrogen supplements and experiences gender dysphoria come up in passing, but only in the context of how these things might affect a given match, allowing Rongen to step in and fix things with a quick pep talk. The storyline has already come under fire, and while there’s merit to some of these criticisms, Next Goal Wins is far too dull to warrant any real controversy.
It's also dull in appearance, with a noncommittal palette of overcast natural light that rarely changes, offering little by way of atmosphere or visual storytelling. Only a handful of its frames seem to have been conceived with any emotional purpose in mind. From the moment Rongen is welcomed to American Samoa by the president of its soccer federation, Tavita (Oscar Kightley), Waititi has trouble balancing sincerity and snark, leaving Next Goal Wins in an awkward tonal middle ground, where it can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. It’s a culture-clash story that is itself a cinematic culture clash, with the deflation of grandeur typical of New Zealdander comedy – the industry where Waititi got his start – colliding headfirst with the cheese and melodrama of the American underdog movie, but without ever reconciling this contrast.
The result is rampant insincerity in serious moments – except for a smattering that draw a great performance out of Fassbender, but arrive far too late to be effective – alongside farcical comedy accidentally injected with gravitas. At one point, a character gets mowed down by a bus in an attempt at slapstick, but it’s nothing but wince-inducing.
Next Goal Wins isn’t particularly concerned with the sport at its center, which is a major part of the problem. It works a laissez faire approach into its viewpoint, wherein Rongen needs to learn to chill out a bit, but this translates to no one particularly giving a shit about what’s happening on the field, including Waititi himself. There’s nothing amusing or thrilling about the way he shoots soccer (if he chooses to shoot it at all), which results in the movie feeling increasingly devoid of stakes.
There are brief moments when Next Goal Wins bursts to life, but none of these actually involve Rongen or the American Samoan team. Rather, they involve the movie’s villainous Tongan national squad, who are perfectly cast as a bunch of bullies with a distinctly serpentine appearance. When they taunt the naïve, happy-go-lucky American Samoan team, they move as a single, slithering unit, in such a way that Waititi manages to mine humor just from the way he frames them. For a brief window before the two teams’ climactic showdown, it seems like Next Goal Wins might actually find itself by embracing its sketch-comedy stylings, but these hopes are quickly dashed, and the film goes back to leaning on its biggest crutch: pop-culture references galore.
