The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: United Passions. First, before I go into it, some backstory: the film was commissioned by FIFA, which pumped $25 million into a movie about its founding and its struggles with corruption just enough talk about corruption that it at least sounds like the same organisation that would be mired in corruption scandals mere months after its European release. Its US release, astonishingly enough, was a week and a half after the first wave of arrests. The opening weekend take? NINE HUNDRED AND SEVEN DOLLARS. Yes, it was that fucking low. Just to put that into perspective, here's the full weekend box office take for that week (note, BOM actually records a lower take). Notice that the biggest earners marked their earnings in the millions, and this one is in the triple digits. Notice also that United Passions also made anywhere between 3.26-4.87% of the money in that period as Island of Lemurs: Madagascar, an IMAX documentary that had been in theaters for well over a year at that point. Seriously, this movie couldn't have had worse timing if it was a biopic of Harvey Weinstein where he managed to single-handedly stop the Hollywood rape epidemic... and released it in mid-October 2017.

But what of the film itself? Surely the fact that it's one of the lowest-scoring movies on Metacritic (tied with Bio-Dome, Chaos, Death of a Nation, and Singing Forest) can't be all due to a case of bad timing, can it? Well, bear in mind, that this movie was that this movie about the most popular sport in the world focuses almost entirely on the executives pulling the strings. That's not really a good sign for an exciting movie, even if you do actually give a shit about the sport. But, hey, there's such a thing as the MacLean rule. Sure, I made it up, but, surely, if Norman MacLean can take something as boring as fly-fishing and make an engrossing book about it, surely Frederic Aubertin should be able to make even this an interesting film.

Nope. They deal with the foundation of the World Cup, and its corruption scandals (admittedly, just so Sepp Blatter can end up insisting that "the slightest breach of ethics will be severely punished;" nice words coming from a man who'd end up embroiled in the scandals and ended up with an eight-year suspension from his duties), and they make it all seem like the most boring piece of shit ever. They can't even make their initial attempts at attention-getting, including a remarkably Trump-like insulting of Uruguay for winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in football, interesting. Why is this? Well, I'm not familiar with Auburtin's work, but it seems like this is his first project as a writer or director where he had to speak English. As a result, this  may very well explain the stilted dialogue. As a result, you have actors like Tim Roth, Gerard Depardieu, Sam Neill, and even that fake Indian guy from Short Circuit, giving wooden performances, and often through accents that sound fake, because they have to deal with this shitty script. That said, I think that having either all or the vast majority of their budget (reports vary as to how much the film costs, anywhere between $25-32 million) underwritten by the subjects of the film, who were looking for cinematic fellatio and not for a film that brings up the rampant corruption that was already an open secret, even before the scandal.

To Aubertin's credit, he would later say "Now I'm seen as bad as the guy who brought AIDS to Africa or the guy who caused the financial crisis. My name is all over [this mess], and apparently I am a propaganda guy making films for corrupt people." In addition, Tim Roth admitted later on (once he felt like he could show his face in public again) that he did it strictly to get out of "a financial hole", and added that "The hole FIFA has dug for itself is so deep, they'll never get out of it." He also asked the producers during filming "Where's all the corruption in the script? Where is all the back-stabbing, the deals?", and after finally figuring out that the film he took for the money made a point of not dealing with it, he decided to play Blatter as corrupt as he could without being obvious. 

On the technical side of things, it's just fine. At least Aubertin knows how to point a camera properly. And "Substitute" and "Wild Wild Life" are good songs used in a less obnoxious context than "Stuck in the Middle" was in Bio-Dome. It's a shame they couldn't properly insert Tim Roth's Sepp Blatter into footage where he hands a cup to Nelson Mandela, but, hey, at least they're not superimposing his adult face on a small child. Also, there's a scene covering the infamous 1950 Uruguay vs. Brazil match, and they play Brazil's loss like a tragedy on par with World War II. I mean, yes, Brazil didn't take their loss well and several fans killed themselves as a result of it, but the film utterly failed to give any reason for everybody, even the stuffed suits, to be so invested in a Brazilian victory. Was this one of the condition  used to sweeten the pot so they could secure a Brazilian world  cup in 2014?

That said, at this point, this may very well be the worst film I've seen for the Project. Yes, worse than the Disappointments Room. At least that film was less than 90 minutes. This is almost 110. Thank Jah the longest film on the list is only 121 minutes long. And I'm sure if I actually knew that much about sports, I wouldn't even hesitate. Seriously, I learned more about association football either in anticipation of watching this film or from cross-referencing the bullshit in this film with information I could find on my laptop than I did in the last 29 years of my life.