Next Goal Wins (NC16)
104 minutes, opens on Dec 7
2 stars
The story: The American Samoa team is the world’s worst national football squad, infamous for a historic 31-0 loss to Australia in 2001. American coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassender) has three weeks to turn things around for the 2014 Fifa World Cup qualifiers in this true tale.
Next Goal Wins, a feature adaptation of a 2014 documentary of the same name, is like every underdog sports dramedy.
The plot is paint-by-numbers. There are the requisite slapstick training montages and conflicts with the foreign coach in the run-up to an odds-defying triumph.
That the writer-director-producer is Taika Waititi is the only surprise. This Maori multi-hyphenate brought zany idiosyncrasy to the superhero behemoth Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and is cherished for his indigenous stories, the vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows (2014) and the box-office record-breakers Boy (2010) and Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016).
His stereotyping of the diverse Polynesian Triangle ensemble as lovable losers is hence depressing.
The characters are barely differentiated except for Tavita (Oscar Kightley), the cheery local federation chief, and striker Jaiyah Saelua (newcomer Kaimana), who was the first transgender player in the World Cup.
She is a character leagues more interesting than Irish actor Fassbender’s uninspired performance of the coach.
All the natives nevertheless exist solely to support Rongen’s redemptive journey.
An alcoholic with anger issues, the experienced but troublesome manager has been banished to the island for want of other job assignments. He throws chairs and tantrums on the pitch until he learns finally to embrace the community’s happy-go-lucky culture: “There’s more to life than soccer.”
Is this why the movie also does not bother with any memorable ball action?
Hot take: Two yellow cards for the hackneyed feel-good farce.
Trending Topic (PG13)
121 minutes, opens on Dec 7
2 stars
The story: The editor-in-chief of a Chinese social media platform faces a moral reckoning when her buzzy article on teen bullying takes a shocking turn.
It all begins with a viral clip of a schoolgirl pushing her classmate down the stairs.
Chen Miao, the hard-driving editor played by Zhou Dongyu in Trending Topic, has six million fans on social media and is hungry for more.
She feeds off the misfortunes of others for page views and share counts. Her sensationalising of the video triggers a trolling campaign that leads inadvertently to the bombshell discovery of widespread student sexual assaults.
The perpetrator, a big business chairman, is her investor.
It is at this dramatic juncture that director Capa Xin (The Coffin In The Mountain, 2014) suddenly becomes a fan of She Said, the 2022 Hollywood account of two intrepid New York Times reporters investigating movie industry sex crimes.
His critique of clickbait culture and cyber bullying pivots into a journalism procedural with Chen recast as a grassroots activist, who sacrifices her career in her dogged pursuit of truth and justice.
She is a one-note character, whether amoral and hateful (then) or noble and boring (now).
Pity Zhou. Contemporary Chinese cinema’s most hardworking actress has already chalked up no fewer than seven appearances in 2023, including the Anthony Chen art-house romance The Breaking Ice. And, here, she has two more contradictory roles because the movie is undecided on what it wants to be.
Hot take: China’s #MeToo newsroom melodrama has the mustiness of yesterday’s headlines and a confused agenda, not to mention an overlong runtime.
