In 2001, the American Samoa football team achieved hideous immortality by sustaining a world-historically awful defeat, going down 31-0 to Australia. Ten years of hurt followed with no appreciable improvement, and then the team hired a foreign coach with his own issues: the troubled and hot-tempered Dutch-American Thomas Rongen whose unofficial brief was to salvage American Samoan honour with a single goal.
Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s 2014 documentary about all this, Next Goal Wins, is a much-loved heartwarmer. Maybe it needed a fiction-feature comedy remake and maybe it didn’t. But director Taika Waititi and co-writer Iain Morris have done one anyway, and the result, though necessarily sacrificing the stranger-than-fiction value of the documentary, is broad, affectionate and often funny in a goofy way. But the underdog sports comedy genre can’t really absorb the devastating revelation of tragedy that this real-life story contains (not to have included or acknowledged it, however, would have been a misstep).
