Goal! The Dream Begins

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Sports

Just when you feel so harassed or exhausted after a week’s work, here comes one supposedly “feel-good” movie that will rather make you feel bad about many things in the end.

As a “good” movie is supposed to inspire the audience [because it must present something new and fresh, regardless of any trite topic], “Goal: The Dream Begins” falls short in many respects.

In this latest onscreen sports saga—perhaps belonging to a list of Hollywood staples—Kuno Becker’s Santiago Munez dreams big to play in the English premiership and then makes it, period. No more, no less.

Munez appears fresh in his boyish and savvy countenance as a newcomer in England’s Newcastle United, but his clear, pretty-boy looks alone do not account for what he has to do much in the film.

Yet, the entirely boyish smiles and grins and a contrived acting do not convince much, not to mention the film’s simply ordinary storyline.

The actor’s pretty face does not work well for a serious character who can elicit sympathy for his efforts and achievements as a struggling migrant who makes it big in the city and in the world. He fails simply because hid face does not look challenged and as convincing, and does not deliver much.

Coming from a poor Mexican family who once escaped to California, Santiago Munez may have convinced us with his diligence and hard work common in America migrants—but the movie appears to assume so much from the audience.

In other words, one needs to have read American or Mexican Revolution first—so we would understand the temperaments and the racial undertones working in the film. Sadly, not all people would know or want to know about it—thus the film settles with the simple biographical account of this poor boy’s life who becomes professional through a series of ups and downs.

In doing so, it simply reels off as a pastiche of some football history memorabilia—showing football drills under the rain, pristine soccer fields in the British countryside, and jump-packed dome in English cities, one that a social-climbing middle-class father can show to his overeager, disoriented son to dream it big likewise to get to the Western world—where future can be totally uncertain for migrants like Latin Americans, or Asians.

The film instead rolls out time to featuring the addiction of the English people to their own sport. Using the film as payback, or act of gratitude, like Mel Gibson’s own sense of religion in the “Passion of the Christ,” the film’s director must have created the project to enunciate his passion for the sport, or sense of country.

While Stephen Dillane as the talent scout and Alessandro Nivola as Newcastle’s oversexed pro-football main man turn in good, few-lined performances who help the struggling athlete make it to the green field of his dreams, Mike Jefferies and Adrian Butchart flimsy story does not help it deliver to the net of the audience’s satisfaction, as all seems to be left hanging after the movie ends in the Munez’s first and last [so far the biggest] game in London.

This film may not at all solicit any hurrahs or raving reviews from those people who—in their lifetime—have had overdose of similar storylines as in Sean Astin’s "Rudy," or other football or baseball league stories. The movie’s sad fate spells a similar reality in the field of literature, wherein not all writers can experiment or play around with grammar—American poet eccentric e.e. cummings—or reinvent his material—Irish icon James Joyce—and succeed in it.

Not all can succeed in any experiment or hackneyed storyline, unless he does something so clear and unique with it. As an art form, the film propels—or rather “drags”—the viewer through a cliché plot—a marginalized Mexican migrant son who dreams for the stripes on green—is first failed and later challenged by his unrelenting angst-ridden father who would want him to just work in
his own business—but his religious grandmother makes ways and means to make his grandson fly to England—where he is supposed to meet an agent who would later take him to fame. And he simply would.

Not one character is well-explored—even Munez himself—the film is going on as if the main job is to showcase images and histories and encyclopedia input on England’s football and the people’s chalice treatment of it.

While the movie seems to pry open possible sensitive issues such as racial discrimination, it does not pursue them. There are sensible issues or themes better explored—but it stubbornly does not.

Also, cameo appearances such as that by David Beckham do not at all help the film propel to something serious—as the underdeveloped character of the protagonist’s father who would first insist that Santiago remain in Los Angeles, and just “plant kamote” so to speak, but would later become so moved by his son’s prominence when he’d see him playing soccer on international television.

The transformation of his character does not appear convincing because there is not much said or shown about it.

True to its cliché poster blurb—“Every dream has a beginning,” “Goal: The Dream Begins” simply presents the inception of a dream, and nothing much beyond that.

After it rolls out how Munez finally made it to his first game in London, the film rolls up, insensitive to other possibilities—perhaps because it seeks to present something else in the sequel.

It does not present any sensible tension, or serious, realistic conflicts, which—you can argue—can rather provoke introspection from any earnest audience. In fact, some National Geographic or Discovery documentaries featuring the life, times and dramatic stories of athletes the world over might even prove more insightful.

Nothing can be said further.