104 min | PG-13 | November 17, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
American Samoa loses a World Cup qualifier 31-0 and hires a washed-up coach to chase a single goal. Taika Waititi turns the real story into a comedy that keeps interrupting itself to be silly. The team deserved better than a director who cannot stop winking.
American Samoa fields the worst national soccer team on earth. The squad once lost a World Cup qualifier by thirty-one goals and has never scored in official competition. The federation hires Thomas Rongen, a fired coach with a temper and a marriage coming apart, to chase one modest goal. Score once. Next Goal Wins takes this true story and treats it as a delivery system for quirk. The film wants to be about dignity and grief, and it keeps interrupting both to land a joke.
Michael Fassbender plays Thomas Rongen as a man drinking through a loss he refuses to name. He is good in the role and stranded by it. The script gives him outbursts and a redemption arc and very little of the interior life that would make either land. Kaimana plays Jaiyah, a fa’afafine player who becomes the team’s heart, and brings a calm that the film keeps cutting away from. Oscar Kightley plays Tavita, the federation head, with a warmth that does real work. David Fane plays Ace and the rest of the squad register as types because the film never slows down to make them people.
Taika Waititi directs and co-writes with Iain Morris. Waititi opens the film as a priest narrating to the camera, a framing device that announces the comic register before a single ball is kicked. The editing chops every scene to the rhythm of a punchline. A character reaches for a feeling and the cut arrives to undercut it. The island looks bright and flat, shot like a postcard rather than a place, and the score nudges the audience toward whimsy at exactly the moments that need silence. Waititi’s instinct to deflate sincerity, which sharpened his earlier work, here drains the story of the stakes that made it worth telling.
The real American Samoa story carries its own meaning. A team that cannot win learns to measure success by smaller things. Jaiyah’s place on that team makes history without the film needing to point at it. Waititi points at everything. He takes a story about people who already know how to find joy in losing and films it as if joy needs a laugh track. The result moves fast and lands soft and forgets the people it claims to honor.