The Beautiful Game (2024)

The-Beautiful-Game-(2024)
The Beautiful Game (2024)

The Beautiful Game somehow finds its way onto Netflix, a place it has no business being, and the narration by Alvi is one of the most mediocre things one will ever come across. The film follows a heartbroken 70-year-old man who seeks to assemble a team of worthless kids with the goal of winning the Homeless World Cup. Apart from dealing with a medium of hope, Thea Sharrock’s ambitious project of lifting up the disadvantaged accurately resembles a bland British office comedy rather than Jhund and Dream.

As usual, the fascinating Bill Nighy plays the role of Mortimer Molloy, who has spent at least half of his life fighting against and grooming homeless British men. There are also other players, some are British and some aren’t. Also, a stateless Syrian who is a refugee is included. Worse still, only one of them knows how to play football. One day while Mal is out for a stroll, he finds Vinny, the sole player, and asks him to join the team. He never is however willing to do so and maintains that position due to the fact that joining the group means coming to the horrible reality of all being wrong in their initial meeting he shows disdain for the other team’s players and gets annoyed for them not realizing that he is not one of the homeless. But after a rather sad episode, in which his young son embraces him, he has however made up his mind to play together with Mal and the boys for the World Cup in Italy.

Michael Ward portrays Vinny and he has a brotherly bond with Christopher, who is a rebellious character just like the audience saw in Nagraj Manjule’s Jhund or in the case of Park Seo-joon in Dream, the pop icon. All these three films lie within the same theme but at the same time was impressed by the depth and intricacies of the characters and culture which perhaps was lacking in Beautiful Game. Obviously, the filmmakers have varied ways as well. Perhaps, even a dozen jackets cannot cover up Manjule which, for multiple reasons and as one may, was highly storyteller-centric. For example, in Jhund, having a passport was a ‘Men’s Odyssey’, going through an airport was being on the safe grounds of a Matt Damon movie. But while The Beautiful Game is able to portray how its protagonists tackle and overcome different settings, Jhund shifted its focus from the negativities to the negativities.

To a viewer, it may seem that the filmmakers have no coherent storyline structure, apart from the unending fights that besieged Indians have to undergo before they can even hope to be somewhat the heroes of their own movies. Indeed, for Manjule’s actors simply stepping outside the country was a priority, and winning became of less importance, football became a minor detail. The Beautiful Game starts the other way around with its characters in Rome for the World Cup within the first half of the first hour which doesn’t tally with all this. The other ninety minutes are quite literally devoted to the competition which, in such movies, is arguably the most anticipated yet, this being more due to the excitement and fast-paced efforts to capture a game of football.

Their style of telling the story is quick, just as one would depict self-defeat. The fluency does not seem to be there, it’s more Football League style as opposed to the Spanish La Liga “These are the folks who’ve gone down, they have tales actually,” Mal told Vinny as he was trying to convince him for Vinns, it does not have to be a seat at the same table it’s a battlefield. And we go with them the smallest of details and just enough to progress the action. One victim, a Syrian emigrant, recalls how she would explain her story, and another says that she has no qualms about being a heroin addict. At some point, Mr. Mal also refers to his wife who has sadly passed away. It’s a cliché but who cares. The pinnacle that This Beautiful Game is going to provoke the viewers is the fall of Vinny, which in some perspectives is worse off than the unremarkable part where the English coach orders his players to step over an African who arrived late with no one paying attention to the action until the balls were about to be kicked.

Nighy’s works leave a lot to be desired and Zia Mal’s work is devoid of any kind of climax. The Beautiful game had us thinking he took a step back and it was Vinny who seized the spotlight. Taking all this into consideration it would be safe to say that the display was far from shocking but it could have impressed slightly more than it did. There was room for research on class wars within England with the presence of European refugees and the experience of getting a second opportunity. But the movie has other objectives. There has been an inordinate focus on the pitch when they might have borrowed a cue from Ted Lasso and realized that the greatest drama is off the field.

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