Next Goal Wins (2023)

Taika Waititi takes a documentary about the worst football team on earth and turns it into a broad, agreeable comedy of humiliation and redemption. Michael Fassbender plays Thomas Rongen, a coach with a dead daughter and a talent for yelling, dispatched to American Samoa to convert a squad of part-time fishermen into something resembling a FIFA competitor. The film is warm, the jokes are loose, and the whole enterprise carries the faint air of a vacation the cast enjoyed more than the audience will. It opened eighth at the domestic box office, which feels about right for a picture this pleased with its own gentleness.

The cultural work here is genuine and specific. Waititi casts Pasifika performers in the American Samoan roles, and Kaimana's Jaiyah, a faʻafāfine defender, is not decoration but a spine of the plot. Rongen deadnames her during a brawl, apologizes, and the film treats the reconciliation as the emotional pivot it is. The epilogue notes that Jaiyah became the first openly transgender athlete to compete in a World Cup qualifier. That is a real fact, presented plainly, and it lands harder than any of the scripted uplift around it. The film's sense of racial consciousness is softer: an indigenous community teaches a white man humility, and the lesson stays personal. The players work multiple jobs and own little, yet the movie has no interest in indicting the economics of any of it.

What remains is a modest sermon wrapped in slapstick. Respect, acceptance, and the value of showing up are offered without much pressure, and the comedy keeps the preaching from settling in. There is no environmental angle, no body-image commentary, no neurodiverse thread, no revisionist reading of the historical record. Jaiyah ends up captain, which is satisfying, though the film never builds a wider case about women or power. It is a kind film. Kindness, as ever, is not the same as a thesis.