Flasz On Film

Having directed not one but two Marvel movies (Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder), Taika Waititi seems to have developed a desire to come back to his roots with his stranger-than-fiction comedy Next Goal Wins… yet I think he may be about to learn a thing or two about Heraclitus and that it is in fact impossible to enter the same river twice. For the river is no longer the same. And neither is Taika Waititi.  

Ironically enough, I think it is quite easy to pinpoint that the movie itself somehow reflects what might be Waititi’s desire to disconnect from the world of big studio filmmaking with its pre-viz constraints, suited-up moguls pitching in with their opinions and all supposedly artistic decisions filtered through focus groups and whatever it is that Wall Street backers would like to see in a movie poised to make at least a billion dollars at the box office. He might see himself a bit in Thomas Rongen (here played by Michael Fassbender), a football coach who moves to American Samoa to take over their national team and bring them from the absolute indignity of being the worst conglomeration of talentless pseudo-athletes who lost 0-31 against Australia in 2001 into a state where they can maybe win a game. Or at least score a goal.

Well, as the movie shows (and I can only assume that the factual record of what happened has been effectively sidelined in favour of what worked better for the purposes of Waititi’s comedy), Rongen didn’t exactly choose to move to Samoa. He was more or less unemployable, though – as we find out later – he also carried a lot of unresolved grief behind his eyes. Nevertheless, he made the move and thus the film became a mixture of a fish-out-of-water and an underdog sports comedy that tries to find symmetry between Rongen being a misfit in Samoa and his inept footballers being misfits on the international football stage. In theory, that is.  

And this is where Heraclitus comes back with a vengeance because Taika Waititi is not the same filmmaker who made What We Do in the Shadows or Hunt for the Wilderpeople. And he’s definitely not the same guy who made Eagle vs Shark. Problem is that I don’t think he’s aware of that. Comedy is a fickle beast and one’s ability to be funny tends to change with time. Moreover, it is also well known that our self-image lags behind reality, sometimes by whole years. It isn’t exactly surprising, though it may be jarring still, that it might take you a long while to come to terms with the fact you’ve lost some weight or got in shape. You may spend countless months looking in the mirror and failing to notice you are no longer obese.  

Equally, it might be a while before Taika Waititi realizes he is no longer as funny as he once was. Or, better yet, that he is not funny at all. That somewhere along the way, in between those countless meetings with his Marvel and Disney backers, he may have lost that spark he used to have… but he has no idea. Which is quite funny because he does share a lot of symmetry with Rongen’s character but perhaps not in the way he’d like to think.  

The man is in denial – which is the first of five stages of grief described famously by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And Next Goal Wins is therefore utterly and dreadfully painful to sit through because there aren’t too many things that are more embarrassing to experience than an unfunny comedy. Well, maybe sitting through an unfunny comedy delivered by someone who has absolutely no concept of the fact he is bombing mercilessly on stage. Perhaps it doesn’t happen in stand-up because the audience never fails to give such a failed comedian immediate and scathing feedback. In this case, however, Waititi will have to wait for reviews to trickle down to realize the extent of this movie’s failure to do absolutely anything right. Which is where I can only expect him to get angry, thus entering the second stage of the Kübler-Ross process.  

Look, there’s no use dancing around this sad realization. Someone needs to put this man out of his misery and stage an intervention. And if I must be the one to do it, so be it.  

Dear Mr Waititi, on behalf of everyone with at least half a tastebud I must regretfully inform you that your movie Next Goal Wins is not a journey of self-discovery you might think it is. It is not a departure from the depersonalised corporate filmmaking courtesy of Disney, but rather a call to reflect on what you’d like your legacy to be. You can’t turn back time, as it turns out. And it may be impossible to have your funny bone reinserted into your skeleton after it was surgically removed by corporate Hollywood quacks.

I think it would do this filmmaker some good if he was asked to join a screening of Next Goal Wins in disguise, so that he could see how terribly his comedy is landing. Now, there’s always going to be someone who’ll literally piss himself laughing at everything in this movie, but I think Waititi’s eyes would open much wider if he saw how little impact this movie makes. And I have a feeling that I know which bits he thinks are amazingly funny. None of them work, though. The hissing, the walking backwards, the deadpan moments, the quips… Taika’s own cameo. The whole caboodle is frighteningly unfunny. 

As a result, what could have been an uplifting underdog story seasoned with some caustic wit and raunchy comedy, Next Goal Wins is an out-and-out failure to connect on literally every level. Nothing’s funny here. Fassbender is wasted. The fish-out-of-water element – wasted. Elisabeth Moss – wasted. An opportunity to bring some authenticity to the story that Waititi was probably better equipped to tell than others? Again, shamefully wasted.  

It is all for nought. And it is all because the filmmaker had absolutely no idea that he’s no longer the same idiosyncratic auteur who once knew how to make cringy deadpan hilarious. Now it’s just cringy and embarrassing and I reckon it might be because Waititi now instinctively feels the whole world finds his comedy uproarious and irreverent.  

Consequently, the entire movie just falls apart like a cheap suit because when the jokes don’t land, you have no other choice but to look elsewhere for something to latch onto, in a hail-Mary attempt to get something – anything – out of your movie-going experience. Problem is, Waititi’s comedy bets heavily on his jokes landing, thus distracting you from seeing how terribly put together the story is and how awkwardly underdeveloped its dramatic core is, too. But since you’re not laughing, all you can see is a concoction of poorly strung together training sequences, weird segments of Fassbender sitting by himself and even weirder sequences of him interacting with people you can barely recognize because nobody spends any appreciable time developing any characters here either. All those jokes that were supposed to land aren’t landing at all and maybe if they did, this whole movie would have been worth at least four stars and a recommendation for your Facebook friends. Maybe you’d be able to take your parents out to see it because it would have been a great feel-good piece of comedy that’s a bit risqué and a bit more out there. 

But it’s not. Next Goal Wins is a 0-31 loss against Australia – an embarrassing display of acute lack of self-awareness on behalf of a filmmaker who once knew how to make funny comedies. Not only that, but he also somehow manages to waste the potential of literally everyone involved in this debacle whose only use to the world at large is to serve as an illustration to the card titled “denial” for whoever is going to explain the Kübler-Ross process to Taika Waititi, just before literally shipping him off to Samoa for a journey of self-discovery that ironically he thinks he’s on right now.  

Kill. Me. Now.