Sports movies typically culminate, after stirring locker-room speeches, in a dramatic bid for athletic glory. Taika Waititi's “Next Goal Wins” concerns the quest of a historically bad national soccer team, the 2011 American Samoa men's squad, in their struggle to qualify for the FIFA World Cup after an infamous 31-0 drubbing against Australia.
“Next Goal Wins," inspired by a 2014 documentary of the same name, is a sports movie that delights in upending the conventions of sports movies. (Michael Fassbender plays the coach brought in to turn the team around.) For Waititi, it's a typically deconstructionist approach that leans more into the charisma of its Polynesian cast (among them Oscar Kightly and Kaimana, as the trans player Jaiyah Saelua) than rah-rah win-or-lose dramatics.
