Scanialara
You won't be disappointed!
Kaelan Mccaffrey
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
Fatma Suarez
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Michael Ledo
The film starts out in 1904 as Europe organizes FIFA. The English smugly refuse to join "the Frogs." The movie then jumps to 1924. In a need to create a World Cup it sells itself to Uruguay. Indeed the films jumps rather quickly as it shows us 106 years of history in 100 minutes. Characters are created to die. The only aging makeup was the graying of hair. FIFA appears to be in a constant state of "broke." It has lofty apolitical origins, yet becomes very political and in the end pretends to be the body for world peace. Being broke forced FIFA into the realm of corporate sponsors, who are subject to boycotts, who are swayed by world politics.When watching the film, it is best if one knows the world political theater of the last century as it plays an important background, but there is an assumption the viewer is well informed. The film features a quick symbolic subplot of kids playing football on a third world lot. As the game evolves so does the play on the field. I believe Pele was mentioned about three times. The movie includes some historical footage, but not much.Parental Guide: No F-bombs, sex, or nudity.
thesecondplanetvenus
I'll just warn spoilers just in case, but you hopefully won't need it because you won't watch the "film". In 2011, a Chinese film called 1911 was released, and failed because it was merely propaganda disguised as a film. I thought that after that the world agreed to never attempt this again. But United Passions proved me wrong. It paints FIFA as saints, which is ironic if you're aware of how corrupt FIFA is. They act as if they do everything for the love of the game, and not caring about money. The script is also poorly written. As a final note, I hope Tim Roth doesn't have to waste his talents for the sake of a paycheck ever again.
ferdinand1932
For over a century movies have been fascinated with nefarious enterprises. The Mafia movies - which at the time seemed a long commercial bet - proved that audiences really liked to watch the internal workings of an organization, from how it generated its revenue through to how it dealt with opponents and new business rivals.In a sense "United Passions" is like that: not quite "Donnie Brasco", or "Godfather II" true, but the drama and excitement of making uniform rules and regulations for playing football, or the power plays at board meetings and facing down political oppression n Europe, not to say the daring of Blatter offering sponsorships deals all makes for some pretty heady cinema.That's not to say that its all good. It really isn't. The historical evolution of FIFA is related like a child's essay and that leads to a collective groan, much as any teacher faced with such mediocre aspirations would do as well. The script tends to platitudes and an overbearing pomposity. A film that has a barely concealed sneer at the English is paradoxically in English. As spoken by some actors it is obvious they are not fully comfortable with its stress patterns and cadences.At times it teases with audience expectations as when Blatter holds a roadside rendezvous with another official and they discuss the implications of the Russian-US enmity in the late 1970s. It's scene we've all seen often enough: just as Fredo is dealt with by Michael in the boathouse, and usually presages a hit on an unsuspecting person. None, however occurs. The flirtation with the worst instances of the Bond movie canon lead nowhere, of course, because this is a vanity corporate movie, full of sound and bureaucratic business cant, and naturally, signifying nothing.
Andres Salama
A FIFA financed movie about the history of the FIFA. It is at least quite unusual to have a sports movie that is not about sportsmen but about sports administrators (Moneyball is the only one that comes to my mind). Tim Roth plays FIFA president Sepp Blatter as a honest, efficient if tough administrator (you really need to have a very huge ego to finance a movie where you are the hero, though, as one friend told me, at least Blatter had the sense not to hire Brad Pitt to play himself). The production values are fine, which is to be expected given the reported budget of almost 30 million dollars. Not a great film obviously, but not as bad as expected. It is quite entertaining if naturally very one sided. With Gerard Depardieu (in an enjoyable performance) and Sam Reilly as former FIFA presidents Jules Rimet and Joao Havelange and Thomas Kretschmann as Horst Dassler, head of sports apparel giant Adidas. Amusingly, the movie has a quite crude anti– English tone: every English character in the movie looks bad (England and the other British sides initially refused to join FIFA, seeing it as an upstart organization).
