United Passions

United Passions (2014)

Runtime: 110 agonizing minutes

Directed by: Frederic Auburtin

Starring: A bunch of people who I hope got paid well

From: Several companies, including the noxious entity known as FIFA

I am pressed for time so I'll just say it... this movie does indeed suck. Find out why in my Letterboxd review below:

Yes, I actually saw this infamous film; hey, it was on Netflix Instant. I realize that there are literally hundreds of films I have in mind to watch that are actually worth watching, but I wanted to see this in a car crash sort of way. Also, as people from all across the world are my mutuals and who knows who else will stumble across this review, let me explain: I am not being a Dumb American when I say this but whether you call it association football, football, or soccer, I am not the biggest fan of it.

It is not solely due to how dirty and corrupt it is, as the American sports are pretty dishonest themselves, in different ways. The flopping and drama queen theatrics that ruin soccer for me... well, similar things happen in such things as basketball or football. It's the degree of drama queen theatrics and corruption that sour me on soccer; I rarely watch it and it is unfortunate as if it wasn't for those things it's likely something I'd actually enjoy, following such things as promotion and relegation in the Premier League, or what have you. But anyway, my opinions of the sport have nothing to do with my rating of this; the movie is very bad no matter what. Since they tried to give it a decent release last year-ironically when the floodgates opened and people saw how rotten they really were-everyone gave this movie crap for it being a FIFA financed movie about FIFA, making it look like FIFA propaganda. Well, I can tell you that it IS FIFA propaganda and there's no real reason to see this.

In a span of 110 minutes, they cover 100 years of history in FIFA, so it's not an in-depth look at things and honestly, I am not sure why they thought this was a good idea, aside from the obvious of lionizing some controversial figures in their history. I am a nerd so a book or a multi-part documentary-created by an unbiased source-would be of interest to me. This movie, though, you don't care about any of these yelling or rude A-holes as they haphazardly skip through time chronologically so it's the opposite of exciting. Even with the disclaimer at the beginning, the amount of lies in this that I've heard about makes this useless as an informative thing. I am talking about more than the amazingly bold falsehood about how SEPP BLATTER is strongly anti-corruption. It was easy to see that it was also anti-English, anti-media (fancy that) and strangely, anti-Uruguayan.

The movie allegedly cost almost 30 million bucks and the vast majority of the budget came from FIFA; heaven knows the location of that money before it ended up in their coffers. The periods that the movie takes place in likely was part of it, and so was having a main cast of familiar faces, like Gerard Depardieu, Sam Neill, Tim Roth (looking like he's constipated more often than not), Fisher Stevens and Thomas Kretschmann. They are in a production where the main figures are shown to be facing charges of scandal... only for it not to be explained and instead blown off, usually pretty quickly. But I guess that'd get in the way of their lionization now, wouldn't it?

This movie isn't even worth much in the realm of unintentional hilarity. Sure, Neill as a Brazilian is absurd but otherwise, this is just pretty boring and considering its propaganda nature, there's no real reason ever to see it. The best thing about it is that it gave the cast and crew a paycheck, something that helped pay for two of Roth's children to attend college; honest, that was admitted by him recently and while he has not watched the final film he realizes it's a pile of crap and Blatter-who he played, after all-is a deplorable human being. The expensive nature of American colleges & universities is worthy of a book or a multi-part documentary of its own, but those that don't live here, you'd be shocked.

Point is, this piss-poor attempt at making the scummiest of groups appear to be the paragons of virtue and pure goodness is not something that should ever be watched. Watch the good movies that the stars have done, or if you love football, check out a match instead as that'll be a much better usage of your 2 hours.