BBC import Footballer’s Wives, minus the wives and further recalibrated to PG-style melodrama. (Yes, this means there is
an explosive argument in which one character chafes at parental counsel
by belting out that he wants his “own life.”) If soccer doesn’t have
quite the stranglehold in the United States that it does around the
rest of the world, it won’t matter for the core audience of this
attractively shot underdog’s tale.

The story centers on a
hard-working illegal immigrant living in Los Angeles, Santiago Munez
(Kuno Becker). Having snuck across the border with his family when he
was but a child, Santiago finds his opportunities severely limited. He
works as a dishwasher and does landscaping with his father, Hernan
(Tony Plana), but his real passion is soccer, which he plays with a
local club team. One afternoon, former British player turned freelance
scout Glen Foy (Stephen Dillane) witnesses Santiago’s tremendous innate
talent and pitches him on trying out for Newcastle United. Against the
edict of his practical father, Santiago heads to England, courtesy of
clandestine travel arrangements booked by his loving grandmother.
There, Santiago hooks up with Foy and promptly botches his first
audition, on a muddy pitch in the driving rain — much different
conditions than he’s used to in L.A.

Foy prevails upon reluctant Coach Erik Dornhelm (Marcel Iures),
however, to give Santiago another shot, and Santiago eventually makes
the practice squad. While the Newcastle A-team and its party-happy new
star, Gavin Harris (Alessandro Nivola, deploying sly, dark charm),
makes a late-season push to try to salvage a playoff birth, Santiago
must negotiate standoffish teammates, a coach trying to teach him the
value of a pass and his own secret struggle with asthma, all while
wooing nurse Roz Harmison (Anna Friel).

Impressively staged outdoor action mixes in energetic club tracks
from Kasabian, The Perceptionists, Unkle, Supercharger and deejay Paul
Oakenfold. One of the interesting things about the movie is that casual
viewers have less of a relationship with the sport of soccer through
predetermined television angles than baseball or (American) football,
which somewhat feeds the match excitement. Unfortunately, though,
there’s a lot of character-rooted drama, and it’s here that director
Danny Cannon — who’s made good coinage on all the various iterations of
CSI — is less successful. Granted, he’s saddled with a cobbled
together script that too often doubles back to validate twice over
Santiago’s choices; one sequence, in which he explains to Coach
Dornhelm why he’s chosen to remain with his teammates in the face of
grave family circumstances, is immediately and pointlessly followed by
a phone conversation with his grandmother in which she declares,
“You’re right, it’s God’s will.” Worse still is a score by Graeme
Revell that swells disagreeably during these melodramatic moments,
feeding the movie’s overly demonstrative style.

Savvy casting helps Goal! trump its formula. Iures strikes just the right balance between taskmaster and mentor, and Becker (Imagining Argentina, Mexican television’s popular Soñadoras),
if honestly a bit one-note, has a certain magnetic charm to match his
perfectly boyish good looks. Brief cameos by David Beckham, Sven-Göran
Eriksson, Raul Gonzalez Blanco and other soccer stars, but most
importantly the sanctioning of governing body FIFA, lends the movie a
rooted authenticity that’s missing in many Hollywood sports films. If
underdog tales are your screen soft spot, you’ll likely be hollering Goal! (Touchstone, PG, 117 mins.)

“Strange” might be one of the best ways to describe director
Wolfgang Petersen and Warner Bros.’ streamlined, mega-budget
refashioning of producer Irwin Allen’s 1972 capsized-ocean-liner flick The Poseidon Adventure. “Unsuccessful” might be another.

While
its reduction in handle was dictated from on high by marketing folks
(“One-word titles sell better internationally,” Petersen says he was
told), dropping the surname might be a good idea given the movie’s
rather stark depictions of mass disaster as mass entertainment in a
more on-edge, post-Sept. 11 world. (While its graphic nature isn’t
sustained, the movie’s PG-13 rating is borderline generous, considering
that dozens of people are engulfed in flame, and electrocutions and
tumbling corpses are seen en masse.) There’s air-quote adventure here,
but it’s hardly of the swash-buckling type. No, the interesting thing
about the spatially challenged Poseidon is how closely it hews,
emotionally speaking, to another genre: the slasher flick. Inexorably
on the rise, water comes off as a faceless stalker here, dispatching in
like fashion members of a thinly sketched ensemble with swift (sans
credits, the movie is just under an hour and a half) if generally less
dispassionate focus than any number of masked psychotic killers.

Emmy Rossum)
and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel); Maggie James (Jacinda
Barrett) and her 9-year-old son Conor (Jimmy Bennett); galley waiter
Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez) and his stowaway companion Elena (Mia
Maestro); and Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), a well-to-do, older
gay man despondent over the recent dissolution of his longtime
relationship.

Unlike some of its ’70s-era ancestors, Poseidon isn’t glib or
kitschy, but it is marked by some puzzling inconsistencies and lapses
in logic, which help spur feelings of tonal vertigo. As the ship’s
captain, Andre Braugher has to deliver a bizarre speech in which he
holds forth about “man emerging from the salty depths,” and intones
that the ancient marine deity Poseidon “made his home on the ocean
floor.” (Wow, nice foreshadowing.) Faced with questions from fellow
passengers after the catastrophe, meanwhile, Josh Lucas has to suffer
the indignity of huffishly barking the line, “Hey man, I work better on my own!” Umm… all right.

A total pro and a veteran with oceanic mayhem from his experience with both Das Boot and The Perfect Storm,
Petersen crafts just a few sequences that really stick in your craw.
The ship’s capsizing feels like watching a human pinball machine, with
uniformed stunt-people bouncing to and fro in a manner that may prove
unnerving to some. Narratively, the film also benefits greatly from
some fresh, breathlessly paced decisions with regards to whom to kill
off and when. In a time when it’s become increasingly easy to blindly
predict fatality based on character type and/or casting, Poseidon
presents a few head feints and at least some difficult choices/moments
for its charges, and this injects the proceedings with a few flashes of
tension largely missing in such fare. Poseidon’s pièce de
résistance, though, comes during a vertical shaft ascent, in which the
group, with water rising beneath them, must wiggle through a confined
space and somehow smash through a locked grate. The claustrophobia here
is palpable.

Damningly, though, Poseidon lacks almost any contextual
clarity. That the characters are almost all cardboard proxies is
forgivable, really, given that so much of what’s here as backstory is
awkward and/or awful. What the movie most vitally needs, then, is an
overview of its obstacle course, so that its headlong dash makes some
sense. Instead, characters make loose, of-the-moment proclamations with
regards to their course of escape, and rip conveniently placed
emergency diagrams off the wall when cornered, instantly translating
that into actionable intelligence. Through ostensibly driven by Johns’
naval experience and Ramsey’s disaster preparedness, none of this
passes the smell test, and we as the audience have no sense of
differentiation from one room to the next. We just know what Klaus
Badelt’s score tells us, which is that… more water is coming.

A slick tale of group-enabled heroics, Poseidon means to be,
in its own allegorical way, a celebration of humanity under duress,
presumably of the genus of the sort of quick thinking that helped save
lives during Hurricane Katrina and the attacks on the World Trade
Center. In actuality, though, it’s nothing more than a snuff film for a
higher income bracket. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 98 mins.)