It's everything. Even before production began, FIFA's rep in the professional football community has been suspect for decades so for FIFA to produce a shameless propaganda/vanity piece was highly misguided.
Taking recent events aside, the film itself does have positives. It's visually impressive and generally the performances are decent. Direction though was stilted and unremarkable. A couple of times, I was genuinely impressed. The joke of putting the perceived worst player in goal was spot on as was the 80s montage with its garish wipes and era defining style.
The huge problem was its focus and later, its intent. The film is essentially in two parts - pre and post Blatter without any narrative through line.
Pre-Blatter. Depardieu was good as Rimet but it was all too short, yet all too dull and clunky. It could've been interesting to explore the history but it simply flitted through several decades of incidents with no drama whatsoever. It also came off as anti-English most of the time.
Post-Blatter. This got a bit more interesting but again, condensing three decades into an hour was ridiculous. Roth as Blatter goes from one incident to another, in-between updating Sam Neill. The obvious intention here was to portray Blatter as the white knight of international football, spreading the game all over the world (and bringing peaceful political resolutions to warring nations) all the while, a secret cabal of FIFA members acted corruptly behind his back.
So this is where it got comical. Even if the film avoided every controversial factor from sexism, racism, homophobia, slavery and death; recent events have given the film a subtext it did not foresee (though it really should've anyway). Scenes meant to convey Blatter as shrewd and tenacious in retrospect, appear like a bad mafia movie, Blatter being two steps away from Michael Corleone.
And as the film ended, I wondered why I wasn't watching an epic Scorsese crime drama instead because THAT would be the awesome FIFA movie.
But my final thought was that final scene. Throughout the film, scenes of a football game in a third world country is interspersed. The boys put the only girl in goal as they believe she can't play. The last moment sees her catch a rebound, stares at the ball, then (pro-feminism y'all) runs up the field and scores an amazing individual goal, whereupon she is lifted shoulder high and the celebrations begin...
- except the game isn't over! Football matches don't end after one amazing individual goal and she's already let in at least one penalty!
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legionaairre
9 years ago
I agree with all of your points, especially the pseudo-mafioso vibe the movie entailed at MANY points. However it really isn't the worst movie in the world, and I'm not sure that the pitiful rating it currently has is a true assertion of its quality as a film.
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