United Passions, FIFA's $30 Million Movie About Itself, Is Even Worse Than You Think

Warning: this review is nothing but spoilers. But you weren't going to see this movie anyway.

For a time, it was universally believed that the worst soccer movie you could possibly make had already been made. The Goal franchise was a tiresome trilogy of hokey dreck, a stack of garbage six hours high and an offense against the already troubled genre of soccer cinema. It had surely done enough to ensure that it would forever stand as the undefeated champion of soccer flick suck.

And then there was United Passions, which was released today in the U.S.

Long shrouded in mystery because it had only been released in Portugal and Serbia, and then in Russia and Azerbaijan, United Passions was FIFA's cinematic vanity project and the pinnacle of the organization's blithe and tone-deaf self-promotion. Also it has a very stupid title, and it arrives in theaters in the midst of the worst scandal in the organization's history.

It's more than a terrible title, though. It's an unspeakably awful movie. The dialogue is silly, the structure random, the accents bad, the acting worse, the history revisionist, and the very existence of the whole thing incongruous.

It's so bad it doesn't even have any let's-just-watch-it-to-make-fun-of-it value—it is fully gone over to the other, self-immolating side. It's too fetid even to be screened as a joke by the most dedicated, masochistic ironists. If you were to submit United Passions in film school, you'd be expelled, even if the building had your father's name on it.

Ominously, it begins with a disclaimer. While this story is inspired by actual events and real people, certain characters portrayed, characterizations, scenes and dialogue spoken represent a work of dramatic fiction.

No shit. FIFA funded almost the entire $30 million budget for this movie. (Which leaves you wondering what kind of depraved money-laundering scheme made up the difference.) The narrative, unsurprisingly, polishes FIFA's scandal-stained history to a high shine, until you can only see Blatter's grinning elfin face in its reflection.

Strangely, the film is interspersed with scenes of kids playing on a dirt field. As in a Benetton ad, they represent every conceivable race and color. There's one white girl, daringly stepping into the fray. But we don't learn her fate until much, much later.

This film is about as action-packed as you might expect from a story about administrators and a roving band of sharp-tongued bureaucrats. Ludicrously, it casts Sepp Blatter—the utterly disgraced outgoing head of an utterly disgraced organization—as some kind of reformist maverick, always on the right side of things, viscerally put off by corruption or even the mere whiff of it, and devoted to transparency and good governance.

But first we have to slog through the organization's long and mostly uninteresting history, which makes the English—whose real-life media has been a scourge to real-life FIFA—look like a band of snobbish and bigoted Lord-louts. Jules Rimet, FIFA's long-time president and World Cup inventor, is endlessly Godded up. ("He's mad!" "No, he's a visionary!") When Blatter enters the story, he begins asking questions about the disappearing money under then-president Joao Havelange and signs a personal check just for FIFA to make payroll to its staff that month.

The cinematic Blatter, then working as FIFA's technical director, is indefatigable. While creepily hanging around some youth soccer practice in Africa, someone tells him not to work so hard, that he should take a break. "When the World Cup is here, in the USA, in Asia, then I'll take a break," responds Blatter, meekly portrayed by Tim Roth in a wait-is-that-really-him performance.

Because Blatter is our hero—"May God hear you, Blatter," Havelange actually says—we see him clawing FIFA towards solvency and respectability, primarily by wooing sponsors in parking lots and chance encounters at bars. He pleads with Havelange to commercialize, and develop the game around the world. The pair are portrayed as anti-Apartheid warriors, benefactors of Africa and Asia, crusading against corruption and injustice. Unlike the English, those racist crooks.

(In real life, Havelange and Blatter realized they could consolidate power by pandering to Africa and Asia and locking up their votes. Remember: inspired by actual events).

There's even a good ol' fashioned A-Team-in-the-garage-and-Mr. T-just-flipped-down-his-welding-mask montage of all the hard work they were doing, makin' deals and gettin' paid. Except they are making the right kind of deals, and getting the good kind of paid. For FIFA. And soccer development. Not for Jack Warner, and definitely not for Chuck Blazer. For the kids in Africa, who need more coaches and deserve a chance.

Eventually, the narrative even throws Havelange, living a decadent life while Blatter toils thanklessly, under the bus. There can only be one hero, after all. The Brazilian soccer aristocrat had hired Blatter and served as his mentor. But the movie implies, rather heavy-handedly, that FIFA was a cesspit under him, before Blatter swooped in and cleaned the place up.

When Blatter is finally president, in 1998, he admonishes his grafty underlings at a meeting. (It was the powerful executive committee in one of the early drafts of the script, but is some kind of marketing department in the actual movie). "You may feel that this is a good opportunity to close lucrative deals with certain lobbies," Blatter says. "Think again. This sport is spotless. There's simply a lot more money involved in ours. Which is why we will be… exemplary, in all respects. The slightest breach of ethics will be severely punished." (Worth noting: FIFA didn't have a code of ethics until 2004.)

"Is that a threat, Mr. President?" one of the incredulous and corruptible people in the meeting asks.

Our hero Big Swinging Dick Blatter doesn't blink. He backs the dissenters down. He will rule with his just and righteous fist. He's even friendly with an investigative journalist—BECAUSE SEPP HAS NOTHING TO HIDE—who accuses not Blatter but others of embezzlement.

The rest of the media are assholes. In a press conference set in 1982, an unwieldy pack of them—inexplicably speaking in American accents, even though the U.S. media didn't give a quarter of a crap about soccer back then—ask difficult questions, as assholes would.

Our beloved protagonist is perpetually pitted against his antagonistic and evil ExCo. The big, climactic closing scene is him getting reelected in 2002, the last time someone actually opposed him in an election.

The film ends with White Girl from the Benetton ad, which has spanned the whole film's interstices, dribbling across the whole field and scoring. Then there's a quick scene of South Africa being awarded the 2010 World Cup (which, according to the latest accusations, was bought through bribes). Mighty and noble Sepp had delivered a World Cup to Africa at last, fulfilling his long-standing promise. (Only African bids had been accepted for that cycle).

Uplifting African music. Credits.

United Passions is, in its essence, almost two hours of pure FIFA historical masturbation, twisting the past to suit those in power—they were still in power when this movie was made, anyway—and settle political scores. It was outdated a week before its release here, as more than a dozen Blatter cronies were indicted by the Department of Justice and the little man himself was forced to resign.

Understandably, the movie's director Frederic Auburtin pulled out of an interview with VICE Sports at the last moment. The PR company handling North American publicity promised to try to reschedule for next week. But by then, Mr. Auburtin will surely be living under an assumed name in a country that doesn't extradite, presumably after several rounds of plastic surgery.

The Guardian has called the film "pure cinematic excrement;" the Daily Mirror "unintentional comedy gold;" and the New York Post "tedious, amateurish and hilariously ill-timed." They are, perhaps, being kind.

For his part, Auburtin told the New York Times that he didn't "have the freedom to do a Michael Moore movie." "But I accept the job," he said. "I know FIFA is producing the film. … I totally accept, and am very responsible, and I have no regrets. You know the FIFA. You cannot move a finger if they do not know the whole story."

Ironically and unintentionally, the film does manage to summarize the Blatter era at FIFA. Ensconced in their reality-proof bubble, Blatter and company were blind to their excesses and degeneracy, and satisfied with their own clumsy explanations for the things they did, or didn't do. They are perhaps the only people on earth who could watch United Passions and emerge convinced of FIFA's manifest goodness and Blatter's status as a man of vision.

It may well be that, in Blatter's eyes, the story told in United Passions is how it all really went down. He was heavily involved in both the script-writing and production. "Nearly 80 percent," according to Auburtin, who was perhaps trying to abdicate responsibility. Auburtin told the Times that Blatter was deeply moved by the final product, which has yet to be released in France, the country where it was made. "It's a shame," Auburtin told the Times. "It's not such crap." Yes it is, and yes it is.