The poorly timed dramatics of soccer politics play out in the dreadful United Passions.
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| "And the award for the most poorly timed movie of all time goes to...." |
When we think of historically based inspirational
sports dramas, films like Hoosiers, Chariots of Fire, Remember the Titans, Rocky, Miracle and many others come to mind. These are movies that transcend sports
interests that are instantly relatable tales of overcoming the odds with a
little determination and drive. These
are movies that prove if they can do it, we can do it too. Even if our proclivities don’t lie with
sports, sports movies no doubt do have the capacity to inspire viewers to press
on with fulfilling their own hopes and dreams.
Inspirational sports dramas, while often told through the formula of an
underdog making it big, still work as compelling stories that still manage to
make us care about the characters and their uphill battle towards success. United
Passions is not that movie.
The wildly historically inaccurate FIFA financed and
penned soccer league hagiography which recently went down in the news as the
biggest box office flop in U.S. history presents a sports movie of sorts in
which the heroes are the executives and the playing field consists of suits
making deals at round tables behind closed doors. Costing around $35 million to produce, the
film opened in ten theaters nationwide and video-on-demand platforms only to
rake in $918. Released just days after
fourteen FIFA executives were indicted by the FBI for unethical practices
including but not limited to bribery, fraud and racketeering, the ironic
ill-advised timing of United Passions as
a movie consists of two hours of soulless dead space with little actual soccer
gameplay and a lot of zombified performances by its unlucky cast. There’s nothing resembling a narrative plot
anywhere in this thing that’s closer to a corporate company promotional you
should see playing in the corporate FIFA headquarters lobby instead of theaters
saddled with releasing it.
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| "We are patiently awaiting that pizza delivery." |
Every actor who sets foot in this thing, save for the
haggard and rotund Gerard Depardieu who carries over the unwanted sliminess he
purported in Welcome to New York, is
completely wasted by the movie. Poor Sam
Neill goes through the motions and Tim Roth miscast as Sepp Blatter either
needs to fire his agent or stop taking whatever he can get. The once great actor in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction now holds the title for starring in Grace of Monaco and United Passions, two of the absolute worst films in recent memory
back to back. It is indeed a very sad
time to be Tim Roth who reportedly begged the question everyone is who watches
it: where’s the corruption everyone knew about in the script? Even its director has gone on the record
expressing his shame for association with the project, though he had to know he
was going to get Leni Riefenstahl comparisons from the moment he walked on the
set.
Very much the product of corporate whitewashing
intended to dispel negativity currently surrounding FIFA’s serpentine public
image, United Passions could have
been condescendingly disingenuous propaganda if the insidious intentions of its
makers weren’t so cynically obvious. Outside
of the controversy and notoriety its engendered, as a film it has a harder time
qualifying as such than say Kirk Cameron’s
Saving Christmas. There’s a lot of
preexisting soccer footage, a disconnected vignette concerning children playing
soccer in the slums and scenery of bigwigs in office settings talking amongst
themselves but none of it comes together to produce anything remotely
resembling a watchable movie. If United Passions will leave you with
anything, certainly unintentional hilarity not among its offerings, it’s the
knowledge that The Human Centipede III:
Final Sequence is not in fact the worst film of 2015.
-Andrew Kotwicki