paul kennedy

Masterpiece. The one-star reviews (as always) confirm it: ‘my favourite character was the dog’; ‘was spoken in French most of the time’; ‘I rented this movie for $5.99 and the half of movie was in French without any English subtitles’; ‘one of those artsy-fartsy, long shot, short plot, subtitled, multilingual, flicks …’.

This film is naive, as in the painting style, i.e. juvenile: the script is dad jokes interrupted by cliches. Jaia is the only character worthy of any empathy - I felt a tinge of sympathy that her role was hijacked for woke purposes. I mean, the poor beautiful woman struggling with her hair was dragged off the field for doing so, and then conscripted by the writers to score a header to win the ultimate game. This was sheer cartoonish nonsense - not to mention cinematic gift-wrapping of the worst kind. The coach was a drunk dragooned into latter-day revelationism in an apocalyptic half-time - and completely unbelievable - self-realisation during the final. He also kept changing his mind, to the chagrin of the ever-suffering audience, a characteristic that was completely at odds with any steel-nerved coach of any description. The film massively patronised American Samoan and Tongan culture, insulted Christians and was heavy-handed in everything it touched. While amusing in the one-dimensional Disney sense, the film was completely light-weight, like a supermarket cheesecake.