La grande passione

United Passions is a glorified corporate pat on the back made by FIFA that masquerades as a movie.

It has attracted stars such as Gerard Depardieu and Tim Roth.

The story is thin as it traces the rise of FIFA from characters such as Carl Hirschmann and Robert Guérin who were involved in its creation. The idea laughed out by the snooty British who had a more colonial and chauvinistic attitude to football.

Under Jules Rimet (Gerard Dépardieu) the third president of FIFA, the notion was put forward for holding the World Cup tournament, first held in Uruguay. The decision to hold in Italy under fascist Mussolini attracted critics.

João Havelange (Sam Neill) cultivated supported from Africa and Asia, attracted corporate sponsorship and boosted FIFA's coffers. Treating FIFA as his own personal fiefdom with constant allegations of and financial corruption under his watch.

Sepp Blatter (Tim Roth) is the embattled successor of Havelange. Determined to broaden football to a truly global sport played in all continents and by allsexes and ages. The final scene is South Africa being chosen to hold the 2010 World Cup.

Of course by the time the film was released, Blatter and other FIFA bigwigs had faced arrest for bribery and money laundering. Decades if financial corruption had come home to roost and there was nothing this film could do to whitewash it.

The film is technically well made but it is all rather pointless. Some British film critics were hard on the movie, the Brits who claim to have invented football appear as caricatures and FIFA did has not selected England as a World Cup venue since 1966.

Stanley Rous the British head of FIFA who preceded Havelange was lightly dealt with in my opinion. His regime bent over backwards trying to include apartheid South Africa in FIFA and in the World Cup. You can see how Havelange easily played him by courting black Africa.

A film about FIFA, an organisation which is renowned for corruption and skulduggery, finances a film about itself. This should get the alarm bells sounding immediately. The basic plot is simple, football commences as a global sport, FIFA creates itself to manage this new international phenomenon. FIFA is amazing. The end. This is a film about an organisation in which corruption is rife, which pays no taxes, yet has 'billions' in its bank accounts, and which forces countries which win the bidding to host the World Cup to their change laws. FIFA were even allowed to edit the script to their choosing. If you like watching propaganda, then this is the film for you. Otherwise, I suggest that it is given a wide birth.

It's very strange that the one person here who has written a 10 star review only joined IMDb 2 weeks ago and must have done just to write a heavily biased review for this film.

Why on earth was this film ever made? Who did they think would care? Apparently 90% of the budget was supplied by FIFA, which just leaves me wondering who the hell put up the other 10%.

By turns hilarious and nauseating, this shining great turd of a self-congratulatory vanity project is so ridiculous that if someone had told me it was a parody, I would have believed them. It's the kind of movie that makes you want to hurt members of your own family just to give you an excuse to stop watching.

It tells the 'story' of those unsung heroes of the world, FOOTBALL FAT CATS. Who, apparently, are all saints. Why? Just because. Don't argue. And they're ENTITLED to luxury goddammit, because they're making dreams come true. It just so happens that the dreams are their own, and those dreams consist of drinking champagne and private jets and staying in luxury hotels - yes, in a multi-million dollar movie starring famous and respected actors, this film literally has the cheek to include not one, but many lines of dialogue attempting to justify football officials indulging themselves.

Sepp Blatter, cast as a sort of modern day crusader (presumably by himself, I can't imagine why anyone else would have), played by Tim Roth, is given close-ups and swelling emotional incidental music as if he is some kind of hero, but nobody, least of all the filmmakers, seems to have any idea why.

It's honestly like a propaganda film biography of el presidente designed to encourage the cult of personality in some tinpot banana republic. ('Look, he pays the wages out of his own pocket when all others around him are corrupt! He is such a man of the people that he knows the cleaning lady's name!')

It ends up just being bizarre, and you feel sorry for pretty much everyone involved with it. Also, weirdly, this film portrays all English people as racist, sexist, stuck-up tossers. Why? Is it coz they wouldn't join FIFA's gentleman's club 100 years ago? Seems a little petty.

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.

Intro:

"United Passions" is often forgotten, as the film was a colossal failure. Making no money, and getting negative reviews. So, I was curious. I watched it, and I was so bored. It was easily one of the worst experiences I had watching the film.

Why I Hate It:

This movie makes no sense, it doesn't clue in people who aren't similar with Fifa, about what's going on. So me, someone who could care less the organization, was totally lost. And the bad, boring dialogue doesn't help either.

The movie is also very biased in the way that it tells you to route for Fifa. It's also way too short, only at 1 hour and 50 minutes, yet it covers 70 years of history. A movie like "Goodfellas" covers 30 years of history in the Lucchese crime family. And that film is 40 minutes longer. The film centers around the three presidents of Fifa up until that point, and none of them are focused on enough for the audience to care. And even though it's short, those 110 minutes felt like 110 hours.

Conclusion:

This film's biggest flaw is that it doesn't allow me to care about these people. I don't care about Fifa, I don't care about the presidents of Fifa, and I certainly don't about the movie. It feels like Fifa propaganda, and I'm not gonna take it without criticizing it.