Goal II: Living the Dream (2007)

Goal II: Living the Dream arrives as the middle chapter of a trilogy about a Mexican footballer navigating the grand European machinery of the sport, and it conducts itself with the tidy, unbothered confidence of a film that knows exactly which audience it serves. Santiago Muñez moves from Newcastle to Real Madrid, acquires a Lamborghini, a house, and a long-lost half-brother, and discovers that fortune is a fickle companion. The commercial apparatus of football, the agents, the sponsorship shoots, the luxury vehicles, is rendered as glittering backdrop. Nobody in the frame pauses to interrogate the arrangement. Kuno Becker's presence at the center, alongside Elizabeth Peña and Leonor Varela, gives the film a genuinely Latino spine, though this casting flows from the premise of a Mexican player abroad instead of any announced representational project. The story simply requires it.

Anna Friel's Roz is granted a nursing career, which supplies her with a measure of independence and a reason to remain in Newcastle while Santiago drifts. The film uses this well enough, then returns her to the familiar station of the waiting woman. She is a love interest with a shift schedule. The emotional architecture belongs to Santiago, his estranged mother, his brother, his agent, his manager. Women orbit. The mother's account of fleeing violence in Mexico gestures toward something larger, an immigrant family scattered across borders, but the film treats it as private heartbreak and moves along.

This is a conventional sports melodrama, and it makes no effort to instruct anyone. There is no sermon here, no environmental lament, no reckoning with wealth, no broader social program. It wants a Champions League final and a free kick from David Beckham, and it gets both. The result is a film of modest cultural ambition, content to be a sequel, and at peace with that modest station in the world of the sport and of the screen alike, which is a kind of honesty rarely found in pictures that aim higher and land nowhere near as cleanly as this one does with its final whistle, its stadium roar, and its Beckham free kick curling into the top corner while the credits prepare to roll over a satisfied crowd and a story that never once asked to be more than it already was from the very first frame of its opening kickoff, which is, in its own quiet manner, a small and unremarked upon virtue of the sort that tends to go entirely unnoticed by those keeping score of such things as this reviewer is contractually obliged to do, week after week, film after film, without complaint, and without any particular hope of reprieve from the endless parade of sequels that march across the screen in search of an audience and a third act that lands. This one lands. Barely. But it lands.