Tonight, being a lover of pain and soccer and having a free movie credit on Vudu, I decided to stream United Passions. This is a movie about the history of FIFA, the soccer governing body. In case you know nothing of FIFA, it has been shown in recent years to wholly corrupt, and many of its leaders have been indicted for taking bribes and kickbacks, even as soccer has continued to grow in popularity around the world.
This movie came out last year just as many of the scandals were getting full blown, and it was roundly mocked. Every review has savaged it; IMDB gives it a critic metascore of 1 (out of 100), and its ability to not make money (it cost $32 million to make, FIFA putting up most of the money) has become legendary...supposedly a theater in Phoenix sold one ticket for an entire weekend. You would think, from the reviews from critics, that it is the worst movie of all time.
Except that it's not. I've seen some bad movies over the years, and this wasn't the worst. Yes, it was not good...I gave it a 5 out of 10, which on my scale means 'not very good', but that's better than bad. It got the same rating as Aloha and a better rating that Cowboys & Aliens. Some of the cinematography was pretty good, there were moments of actual tension on the story, and the acting could have been worse. Again, it's not Schindler's List or anything and would make a nice selection for the upcoming MST3K reboot...but it wasn't as bad as it was made out to be.
Something like this is a reminder that it's easy to listen to what everybody else has to say and be swayed by it. I was hoping to go onto Facebook and make jokes about it (example: 'if the makers of this movie had been in charge of Spotlight, the heroes would have been the pedophile priests!'), but to do so would have been dishonest. How many of the haters (over 3000 ratings on IMDB that give it an average of 2.0) didn't actually watch the movie? Have they heard so much about how bad FIFA is and just assumed that this is propaganda? Is it just an easy target for people who are lazy in their criticism?
In a way, this could have actually been two very good movies. It's a movie of three acts, lionizing the three non-English leaders of FIFA: Rimet, Havelange, and Blatter. But the substance behind the stories was actually interesting; in competent film directors who were more interested in the organization than the men leading them this could have been well done. The first movie could have been about the need for an organizing body for soccer and how difficult it was to pull things together pre-WWI. The second movie could have been about how FIFA re-directed piles of cash to poor nations to boost their soccer programs. Yes, of course, this has led to abject corruption, but good PR could have made this better.
Perhaps the biggest credit to this movie was that I watched the whole thing, and I don't always do that for movies I did not pay to see. A few weeks ago I finally got around to watching Birdman, which won a best picture award a few years ago...it was pure excrement, and I turned it off 45 minutes into the movie. It was just as self-glorifying as anything one could find in United Passions ("Oh, the beauty of live theater!"), but it was written to please the artistic crowd rather than the administrative professionals crowd. And so Birdman is considered a masterpiece while United Passions is considered the worst movie of all time. Doesn't seem quite right to me.
