Review: Goal 3 - Taking On The World

My foray into the Goal trilogy has been an interesting one, the first was a surprisingly decent flick that tied the rising story of Santiago with the beautiful game, the second was a hefty step down following Santiago’s rise in career but fall in his personal stakes, ending with a cliffhanger that had him at odds with his agent, his friends and his girlfriend who hadn’t yet told him she was pregnant. It was a lot of plotlines that were waiting for a third film to tie them all together.

Too bad then that Goal 3 was a fucking soap opera spin-off with nothing to do with the other two films and only stands out for being one of the most infuriating pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. And I don’t even care about this franchise, I can only imagine how pissed off actual fans were with this.

Fair warning, I’m gonna SPOIL the fuck out of this film because I don’t care and neither should you.

It’s 2006, England are in the world cup and Santiago is playing for Mexico... at least I think so because he’s got dick-all to do with this film. Instead we follow two unknown and unlikeable fuckheads who crash into this trilogy like a pair of pirate wankers and took over the whole thing, Liam, a wannabe alcoholic, and Charlie, an actual living muppet, who are both selected for the England squad. But after a night of drinking to celebrate the taxi they’re in is in a car crash, Santiago can’t play football for the world cup and is promptly forgotten about in the trilogy that’s about his fucking story.

I’m gonna be straight up here, this flick is fucking schizophrenic for the first half and as hollow as a cavern made of the doughnut holes for the second. After the car crash the film starts following Charlie as he falls in love with an actress he’s known for 6 hours and has a happy loving relationship because fuck your happiness. Only the film then bounces over to Liam who finds out that an ex-flame has had a secret daughter, he talks to her, she’s happy to let him be part of her life, he shits himself in fear and runs away to start drinking his life away.

But that doesn’t fucking matter either because once they actual start playing football the Charlie relationship is fucking soft-hearted bullshit that adds nothing, the Liam alcoholism is over as quickly as it started and the rest of the film is focussed on the world cup while occasionally jumping to some shitty and quite sexist comic relief with some of the Newcastle extras from the first two films following the team across Germany and trying to get their dicks wet – I swear the Geordies had more screen-time than Santiago. But that doesn’t fucking matter either because neither Liam nor Charlie plays any football because the film couldn’t afford to put either of them onscreen with any footballers so it’s all stock footage of the actual World Cup with Liam and Charlie on some of the worst fucking green screen this side of Sharknado.

So the film doesn’t know if it wants to focus on Liam day-drinking because he can’t buck up and be a dad or Charlie getting hitched to a girl he’s known for 6 hours and when it decides to fuck all of that and focus on the football there’s no fucking football. I’m legitimately shocked that this film lasts as long as it does because nothing happens for 90% of the runtime, and the 10% with actual plot is so laughably bad I couldn’t take it seriously.

So we’re getting into Spoiler territory here, but at some point Charlie gets an elbow to the face, and this exacerbates an aneurism in his head that he got from the car crash and we’ve never heard of and he fucking dies. Not only does it make the whole ‘Look at our happy fucking relationship that’s lasted all of 2 month’ such an obvious fucking ploy for emotions that had already failed by being focussed on a relationship that’s fucking 2 month old, but for the rest of the film they keep bringing up the fact that Charlie is dead and that’s sad, from Liam shirt of remembrance which he reveals AFTER England have lost the World Cup – which raises the question of why the World Cup? You can’t change history and we already know England lose – to the rushed as fuck wedding in the final five minutes where the main focus is dead Charlie. It’s trying so hard to have a cry moment in a film designed for lads who have been taught to suppress all emotions and kick a hard piece of leather about on the grass.

Even if the story wasn’t a mess of emptiness and clichés then the fucking shitball characters would’ve done nothing to save this film either, Santiago is relegated to a glorified extra who basically hints that despite everything, him and Roz never got back together and by implication he never got back with Glen or Gavin, both of whom are completely absent with no word as to where or why.

The four Geordie extras are trying so desperately hard to be comic relief but just aren’t funny in the fucking slightest, it breaks down to three old farts and one gormless fuck who thinks the best way to talk to a woman is by staring at her tits. Their scenes were such obvious padding that even in a film of nothing but padding they were especially useless.

The two female characters are shit on the most, Charlie’s girlfriend Sophia is supposedly some amazing Latina actress but aside from a couple of comments about her job her entire purpose is be Charlie’s girlfriend, she has no agency for herself other than being a trophy for the fucking muppet. It’s even worse for Liam’s ex June, because she has potential being a single mother willing to give the father of her child another shot, but she’s so quick to turn around that once she’s accepted Liam back into her life I’m not 100% sure she has anymore speaking lines, just reaction shots of her watching the football. Both Sophia and Charlie are just there for attainment, neither Liam nor Charlie shows anything that would give these women any reason to be with them, Liam turns to drinking the second he finds out about his daughter and Charlie has the personality of an unwashed sock, but both women throw themselves at their men because they have dicks I guess.

If you can’t tell already I’m not a fan or Liam or Charlie, Charlie fares a little bit better because he has does the decent thing and fucking dies but both of them are just shit people to follow. It’s bad enough that both of them are treated like we’re suppose to know and care who they both are despite never seeing them before but the film gives no reason to know or care who the fuck either of them are. Charlie’s storyline is focussed entirely on his relationship with Sophia which would’ve been fine except we learn nothing about either of them, he’s such a dull character that I honestly believe they killed him off because they ran out of ways to include him in the film, I’ve got mouldy tomatoes in my fridge that I care more about than fucking Charlie, they’ve more personality too.

Liam ALMOST had something going for him, for the briefest moment when he ran away from his infant daughter after meeting her I though “Ok, a character who self-destructs can be an interesting avenue.” Hell that’s basically what Gavin did in the first film and I though Gavin was the best part of the whole thing, but when he IMMEDIATELY starts drinking it felt like the writers couldn’t think of any other way to show someone’s emotional troubles. And then he gets over it fairly fucking quickly and goes back to not playing football. I’d call him a bell-end but I doubt he’d even qualify that high, both him and Charlie have this outdated ‘Lad’ vibe to them which even by 2006 was out of fashion for Premier Footballers and it makes them both really difficult to give a shot about when they end every fucking sentence with the word ‘Bruv’. Neither of them has charisma, neither character is any good and Charlie overacts his own fucking death scene like a reject from The Room.

The thing’s not even well put together with director Andy Morahan’s last film being 12 years previously and his only film of note being Highlander 3. I’d give him some leeway since he was working with a budget of only $10 Million, a significant drop-off from the $33 Million of the first but that doesn’t excuse a lot of the really, REALLY bad stuff. The shitty green-screen where they force Liam and Charlie into any stock footage of the England team just highlights how little budget they had and how little they gave a shot about this film – the first ten minutes are a fucking BDSM advert in Romanian which has nothing to do with the rest of the story – but you add in how lazily they handle the rest of the film without even trying, they make it so fucking obvious that Liam and Charlie are just forgotten side members of the very real World Cup and so can’t even play the game properly but since they couldn’t afford any actual football stars to interact with them every shot during the game has just one or the both of them set alone while the actual England tema are shot separately in their own universe.

This leads to some real fucking weird scenes, most notably Charlie’s funeral and Liam’s wedding both had as their guests the fucking Geordie extras despite that fact that the only connection they had to the team was that one of them gave Liam a lift in a taxi at the start of the film. No England team members show up to either event despite both being about their team members, and don’t even get started on the timeframe, I made a lot of noise about Charlie and Sophia’s marriage proposal after 4 hours but my flatmate pointed out that with the World Cup being in Germany, Liam (And actually the Geordie extras as well) had to return to England for Charlie’s funeral, then return to Germany for the match all in the space of about 2 days since they couldn’t stop the game already in progress. It’s stuff like that that you pick up on when you’ve been numbed by the shitty 1970s sexist humour and don’t have enough of a story to distract you from the fact that nothing makes any fucking sense.

I’ve had enough talking about this film, don’t even bother watching it, it has no story for the whole 90 minute runtime, the lead characters are fucking nobodies surrounding by empty women and shite Geordies, the humour is non-existent, the fucking football even more so, it’s a fucking soap opera with some of the overdramatic shit it throws at you, it’s cheap and obviously so, it’s not even so bad it’s good because it’s such a kick in the face to anyone who wanted to keep following Santiago’s story and instead got shafted with this mess.

It’s not a 1 for the sole reason that it doesn’t deserve to be recognised for even that level on ineptitude, but fuck me was I tempted to give it here. This is one of the worst sports movies ever made, it makes Rocky 5 look good by comparison, had I gave a shit about the franchise it would’ve gone to the bottom row because there is nothing to save this film on any level.

2/10