Why make a soccer film when the game itself throws up so many good stories? It's a question movie directors might ask themselves before they churn out another formulaic turkey about a rags-to-riches kid who overcomes all odds to achieve glory and prove the skeptics wrong.
Or if it's not one skillful individual fighting doubters and demons, then it will be a team of motley losers overcoming the standard obstacles. Either way, it must end with the crucial game where all is at stake. The question is, how will we get there?
Many are the routes taken, and sporadic is the success of the filmmaker in recreating the excitement and the energy of the real game on celluloid's fictional tableau. In Second World War prison camps, latter-day multi-ethnic London, Communist Poland, urban China or U.S. suburbia, the embattled coaches have assembled their misfits and mavericks to overcome bent referees, internal dissent, corrupt club owners, and dastardly opponents to set us up for the inevitable late heroics.
The following is the U.S. soccer fan's guide to watching the game on those long winter nights when the next MLS season seems too far away, and the Peruvian League on GolTV is just not providing the necessary adrenalin.
The Nick Rimando 'Unlikeliest Goalie' Oscar …
Victory
(John Huston, 1981)
''What kind of game is this? For old ladies and fairies? I quit!'' yells the outraged Yank Hatch (Sly Stallone) at the English officer Colby (Michael Caine) while trying out for a spot on a POW soccer team slated to play the German national team in an exhibition game in WW2 Paris.
So we already know ahead of time in this ponderous, unlikely movie that soon-to-be goalkeeper Hatch, the best-nourished POW in Europe, will pull off the last-minute heroics. Like the camp's stereotypical, snobby English officers, he only has escape on his mind, while Colby and his footballers just want to play so they can enjoy double rations.
You can see their point. Why risk death trying to escape from what seems more like a low-rent holiday park than a Nazi-run POW camp when you can play soccer instead? And indeed, when the French Resistance tunnels into their dressing room at halftime to help them escape, the team manages to persuade Hatch that the result is more important. And so they play on.
The film's most unwittingly hilarious moment comes when the POW team, down 4-0 and up against a corrupt referee ignoring brutal German fouls, loses the gifted Trinidadian Ruiz (played by Pele) to injury and is reduced to 10 men. One of the wooden real-life pros turns to another and says, ''This isn't going to be easy.''
The one-dimensional Hatch not only manages to save the game, but has time to get the girl too (the film jumping swiftly from Roy of the Rovers to Renee of the Resistance), and the happy French storm the stadium exit, taking the players with them, while the Nazis show a historically inaccurate reluctance to open fire on the crowd.
The Carlos Ruiz 'Dastardly Villain' Oscar …
The Game Of Their Lives
(David Anspaugh, 2005)
Finally, a U.S. film about a U.S. soccer team. It flopped, making $375,000 at the box office. You could blame the fifth-rate script or the Elementary School thespianism, or you could blame the fact that U.S. audiences are just not interested in soccer on the big screen.
The film might have been more successful if it hadn't taken so many shocking liberties with the truth. It would certainly have been a better film. But would people have been any more interested in this tale of the U.S. team that beat England 1-0 in the 1950 World Cup's opening stage?
Some Hollywood dunderhead decided on the need for a villain, and settled on portraying England's blameless captain Stan Mortensen, a genuine soccer hero, as a sneering, upper-class twit. This is akin to a British film about basketball portraying Michael Jordan as a fat, white, gun-toting redneck from Texas.
Furthermore, American Walter Bahr is shown as the team captain, when in fact it was a Scotsman, Ed McIlvenny (played by one John Harkes, who should not on any account quit his day job). The two defeats against Chile and Spain are not even mentioned. There's a fictional shirt presentation scene with some high-ranking U.S. Air Force official to big up the patriotic angle. And the U.S. squad is shown having just three weeks to prepare for the World Cup, when in fact they had a whole year.
The on-field action, with genuine soccer players and a hired crowd of 5,000, is recreated well, but it can't alter the fact that most viewers know the result in advance.
The Peter Nowak 'Gritty Polish Realism' Oscar …
Soccer Poker
(Janusz Zaorski, 1988)
An obscure gem from Communist Europe, this lowlight, low-budget Polish movie is hardly Kieslowski, but neither is it a socialist realist template portraying brotherhood and solidarity. Its use of soccer to reflect communism's corruption and cronyism, with almost all involved as obsessed by money as the worst kind of capitalist, neatly foreshadows the Berlin Wall's imminent fall.
It tells the story of Laguna (Janusz Gajos), a soccer legend for once having scored twice in a famous victory over the Soviets, who has become Poland's only honest, and possibly most alcoholic, referee (one of his colleagues is paid on a prostitutes-per-goal basis). Just before retiring, he is derided by all his spurned manipulators as an ''honest fool'' for not having been corruptible enough.
Laguna quits the drink and exacts revenge by playing the crooked club directors against each other. The Polish championship, the integrity of the game and his own personal salvation are at stake. Ultimately, though, it is the unpredictability of the round ball that decides the outcome. It may be disjointed soap opera at times, but there's enough warmth, wit and morality to make this a worthwhile disc to rent for an evening. (Not suitable for family viewing. Available for rent through netflix.com.)
The Rusty Pierce 'Consistent Foul Play' Oscar …
Mean Machine
(Barry Skolnick, 2001)
The soccer version of ''The Longest Yard'' is set in a UK prison with the usual stereotyped cast of psycho guards, a corrupt governor and a selection of hard-bitten inmates less than ready to forgive disgraced former England captain Danny Meehan (played ably by ex-pro Vinnie Jones) for his involvement in a match-fixing scandal.
Meehan, sentenced to three years for drunken assault, asks the statutory prison sage why the other inmates hate him so much. ''You had everything they ever dreamed of and threw it all away,'' comes the response. Despite a fair share of such stock clichTs, both Meehan – who needless to say gradually wins the respect of the other prisoners – and the teammates he chooses for the big grudge match against the guards have enough character and dark humor to keep the film rolling.
The encounter turns out to be the most sound-effected match in soccer history thanks to all the grunts, fouls and punches that would have meant at least a dozen red cards under normal rules. As Meehan faces up to his own personal demon, the outcome's more than predictable, but gratifying nonetheless. (Not suitable for family viewing.)
The Claudio Reyna 'Genuine Quality' Oscar …
Bend It Like Beckham
(Gurinder Chadha, 2002)
There are not many comedies aimed at a family market brave enough to tackle both racial and sexual politics. There are even fewer that are genuinely funny and, furthermore, about soccer as well. Props, then, to arguably the best soccer movie ever made.
Despite the obligatory Important Game At The End clashing with a family wedding for one of the film's two heroines, and the ensuing mad dash to get there and score the winning goal, and despite the slightly creepy notion of the team's coach dating his teenage charges, this tale of a female London starlet Jess (Parminder Nagra) going to extreme lengths to play the game she loves, contrary to the wishes of her Indian family, delivers in almost every way.
Even her hero Beckham makes a wisely non-speaking cameo as the two girls finish up with scholarships to a U.S. college, to be followed by long and fruitful careers in WUSA à
The Paul Gardner 'MLS Missed Hispanic' Oscar …
Goal!
(Danny Cannon, 2005)
This FIFA-backed, product-placing (Brit soccer players drinking Bud? Purleeeease) movie embraces the A-Z of soccer filmmaking. Take one precocious but undiscovered youngster (Kuno Becker as Santiago, an illegal Mexican immigrant in the L.A. barrios). Take his hard-working father who wants him to forget soccer to help run a family business. Then put several obstacles in the way of his dream of turning pro (asthma, no money, angry Dad, and no one from the L.A. Galaxy or Chivas USA apparently bright enough to spot a player with more skills than Ronaldinho).
Add a fortuitous trial at a big club (Newcastle United); a strict, paternal manager; a maverick star into girls, cars and drink; a nemesis out to sabotage his career; a love interest (the club nurse); and several more setbacks, and we're inevitably heading for the Final Big Match. It's 2-2 against Liverpool, Newcastle needs to win to qualify for Europe, we're in the final minuteàoh, but it would be a shame to spoil the ending.
Although the movie's nicely shot (even the action scenes), the screenplay's flat, the music's cheap and cheesy, and the plot's been recycled so often you can only marvel at the audacity of the producers trying to get away with it one more time. More frightening still, it's the first of a trilogy. (Slated for U.S. release in March 2006.)
The Paul Breitner 'Maoist Martial Arts' Oscar …
Shaolin Soccer
(Stephen Chow, 2001)
This Hong Kong-made mixture of farce, football and fantasy is an imaginative pastiche of trite sentimentality and comic book martial arts action, which focuses on street scavenger Steel Leg, a former Shaolin maestro who coaxes his old kung fu crew out of retirement so they can make money by winning the national soccer championship.
Once they've been trained up by Fung, an ex-pro with a grudge against reigning champions Team Evil (forget any hint of subtlety in this one), they waltz through the tournament in spectacular, high-kicking style until the final.
Inevitably they're up against Team Evil, pumped up by their villainous owner on ''American drugs,'' for an ending that blows you away without ever quite making it clear what the final score was. Absurdly good fun.
The Bob Gansler
'Soccer As Purgatory' Oscar
Kicking And Screaming
(Jesse Dylan, 2005)
Avowed soccer fan Will Ferrell does the game few favors with this standard goofball romp about a Dad-dominated sap who takes over his son's useless team and trains them up to challenge for The Cup, becoming unconvincingly psychotic in the process. The rest of the plot's too depressingly familiar to bother recounting.
There's a smattering of decent one-liners, but barely enough to make it worthwhile watching all the falling over, balls hitting heads and clumsy soccer action shots in between. Poor enough to give farce a bad name.
(This article originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Soccer America Magazine.)