31-0 — that was the final score of the World Cup qualifying match in 2001 that made the American Samoa soccer team legends in the world of international soccer. Not legends in a good way, mind you; they were the ones on the receiving end of that epic lambasting. Think about how crushing that must have felt, to see your hopes of glory on the pitch and your sense of national pride transformed into public humiliation. There’s a happy ending to this story, however: The official Federation of the tiny nation hired a former player-turned-coach named Thomas Rongen to whip this ragtag group into shape. He only had several weeks to turn a squad dubbed “the worst soccer team ever” into players who could hold their own against the neighboring country of Tonga for first-round consideration. What followed was a real-life sports underdog story — the kind of incredible, triumph-of-the-human-spirit tale that usually only happens in the movies.
If you’ve seen the 2014 documentary Next Goal Wins (and it’s a pity you can’t stream it anywhere at the moment), you know the details. It’s impossible to not feel uplifted by the way this team overcame a legacy of loserdom, and the manner in which its new father figure found peace among their ranks after suffering a huge personal tragedy. Taika Waititi remembers seeing the doc when it opened way back when, and feeling as inspired by it as the rest of us. Long before he injected 10ccs of goofiness into Marvel’s stuffiest franchise and gave us a wacky-bestie Hitler, the New Zealand-born filmmaker specialized in modest indie comedies brimming with sentimentality, offbeat humor, and audience-friendly quirk. He’d return to his roots to retell this Pacific Island community’s IRL victory in a bigger, buzzier version. But he’d also make it a film by “Taika Waititi,” the name-brand cult-of-personality creative with the always-on absurdist bent. And therein lies the problem.
Waititi is the first person you see and hear in Next Goal Wins, his 2023 dramatization of the America Samoa team’s slow, unsteady march out of perpetual last place. Or rather, it’s his mustache you see first: a giant, silvery bush covering his upper lip and drooping down the side of his mouth. He’s playing a preacher who brings the good word to the islanders, and who introduces viewers to what he calls a “whoa” story — not like Whoa, Nelly! so much as, in his words, “whoa, I can’t believe that pretty much actually really happened, with a couple of embellishments along the way!” (No one’s hiding that fact that poetic license has been taken with this Rocky of soccer: When Waititi introduced the movie at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, he said he was compelled to take this true story “and twist that truth… otherwise, [just] watch the documentary.” Fair enough.)
At least, that’s what we think we remember his holy-man narrator saying. To be honest, it was hard to concentrate on anything beside that beastly growth threatening to devour the bottom half of his face. It’s the sort of sight gag that gets an easy laugh right off the bat at the expense of everything else, from basic exposition to establishing a sense of place or character. The fact that this early cameo from the writer-director accompanies a warning to expect a few factual liberties is less revealing than the idea that he’s shown up, of his own volition, looking like he’s in American Chopper cosplay. It already feels like he’s trying to upstage his own movie, even as that ‘stache is upstaging him. And though he doesn’t show up as this man of the cloth again until Next Goal Wins gears up for its big last act, the hovering presence of the man behind the curtain still eclipses every other aspect of this feel-good yarn, in a way that starts to undermine the actual storytelling. They should have just been upfront and named it Taika Lasso.
The actual Lasso-like figure here is Thomas Rongen, the Dutch-born midfielder who played on numerous stateside teams before becoming a coach. He was later fired from his position heading up the U-20 American men’s national team, which is how this veteran footballer found himself on the tiny island and tasked with turning players with no foundational training into pro-level athletes. Rongen is closer to Ted’s evil alter ego, Led Tasso: he’s gruff, cantankerous, prone to screaming and throwing things, and couldn’t be less stoked to be stuck running Soccer 101 drills. The quaintness of the U.S. territory — not to be confused with “the independent nation of Samoa,” says Tavita (Oscar Kightley), the Football Federation’s head/local restaurant owner/TV cameraman/tour guide, “with their cocky, stuck-up people always bragging about their 24-hour McDonald’s” — offends him. His personal demons are legion. And as portrayed by Michael Fassbender, he’s like a human slow-burn glare that occasionally flares up, usually fizzles into resentment, and doesn’t ask the actor to do much in the way of anything. You wonder what attracted him to the role, other than the chance to work with Waititi.
Rongen is also extremely transphobic in regard to the team’s MVP Jaiyah Saelua, played by the transgender actor Kaimana; she’d become the first transgender player to compete in a Cup qualifying match. He’s told that Jaiyah is fa’afafine, a third gender that’s not only accepted but embraced by the community, and compared to a flower. They bump heads, until they don’t. And the movie treats the character with dignity, until it kinda sorta doesn’t — it’s such a fine, easily-blurred line between showing someone being unfairly singled out for differences and scoring laughs via those same scenes, and giving that character lots of heavy narrative lifting while also reducing them to just one more person helping the lead overcome flaws and obstacles. (There’s already been no shortage of controversy over the way Next Goal Wins tackles this IRL hero, and while Kaimana’s performance is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the movie, there’s the sense that this key character ends up becoming collateral damage amid the film’s clash of tones. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the way the subject, the prejudice or the eventual reconciliation are handled here.)
Kaimana and Michael Fassbender in ‘Next Goal Wins.’
As for the locals and the rest of the players, they’re all treated like residents of a Pacific Island equivalent of those English hamlets from vintage Ealing comedies: basically jus’ folks slightly north of bumpkin-ish, folksy as hell, and sometimes sincere to a fault. Some are passive, like Rongen’s soft-voiced predecessor Ace (David Fane) or the team’s humiliated goalie, Nicky Salapu (Young Rock‘s Uli Latukefu); others are aggressive, like Tavita’s shoe-wielding wife Ruth (the consistently great Rachel House) and Rambo (Semu Filipo), a cop with a killer right foot. Yet they all seem to speak in what feels like the same voice, which you initially chalk up to Waititi giving a certain type of Indigenous culture the rare spotlight treatment. It isn’t until you start to pick up that virtually every character regardless of background talks in a sort of slightly whimsical, partially sarcastic cadence, and each person seems one wisecrack and/or deadpan punchline away from waggling their eyebrows, that you pick up on who they all sound like. Which brings us back to the man behind the curtain.
In Waititi’s earlier films like Boy (2010) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), an anarchic sense of humor hummed just underneath the coming-of-age storylines and cut through the pathos without diluting it entirely. Once he moved on to bigger projects like Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Jojo Rabbit (2019), that dry-witted funny business expanded exponentially to be heard above the din of superhero-movie spectacles or the nightmare of historical tragedies. This latest project brings the scope back down to lifelike but retains the same Howitzer-blast level of ha-ha from his MCU joints and Hitler buddy comedies. The result… well, let’s say it’s doing neither the real-life sports fairy tale nor the artist calling the shots any favors. Next Goal Wins is one of those feel-good movies that comes with good intentions yet still somehow leaves a bad taste in your mouth. No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup play-offs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?
