Premiering in the same Toronto film festival cinema and time slot as Jojo Rabbit four years prior, Taika Waititi is hoping to conjure a similarly magic reaction for his latest, long-delayed football comedy Next Goal Wins. His second world war satire was that year’s audience award winner before it became the next year’s best adapted screenplay Oscar winner, a result that elevated him to a new level of Hollywood royalty, however deserved that may have been.
But while Sunday’s premiere saw roars of laughter and cheers of approval from an easily manipulated audience, it’s doubtful that his latest will be able to emulate even a fraction of that success. The film is a shoddily made and strikingly unfunny attempt to tell an interesting story in an uninteresting way. Waititi was inspired by a 2014 documentary of the same name, which detailed the unlikely rise from infamy to a modicum of fame for the American Samoan football team. After the worst World Cup loss of all time, suffering a 31-0 disaster against Australia in 2001, ex-professional player Thomas Rongen, played here by comedy giant Michael Fassbender, was hired to drag them from the bottom and lift them to maybe just above the bottom instead.
