Netflix's New The Soccer Football Movie is a Soccer Space Jam on Acid With Bootleg Ghost-Busters and "Weird Al" Yankovic. Also, Brain Slugs and a Talking Ponytail. It's VERY Weird, In a Good Way
When he was the one-man-band-leader and sidekick on Comedy Bang! Bang!, Reggie Watts apparently never watched the show. He was willing to delay his gratification because he wanted to stumble upon Scott Aukerman’s TV brainchild, possibly while stoned, years later, and be pleasantly surprised to encounter a crazy show he happened to star in.
“Weird Al” Yankovic is famously a sober teetotaler but I like to imagine a similar dynamic at play with him and Netflix’s new CGI soccer comedy The Soccer Football Movie.
Al is the cameo king. He has appeared in so many movies and television shows that I suspect that he forgets half of them. Al has 189 credits as an actor on the Internet Movie Database and an additional 244 credits for projects where he played himself. With my memory, if I were Al, I would pretty much vaguely remember being in The Naked Gun and that would be it.
One of the many weird things about The Soccer Football Movie, above and beyond its perplexing title, is that Al does not have a cameo in it. No, “Weird Al” Yankovic is pretty much its star but he is neither its hero nor its protagonist.
He is, in fact, the opposite of a hero. In The Soccer Football Movie Al plays a version of himself that is even more deliriously, deliberately fictionalized than Weird: The Al Yankovic, a wild romp where he romances Madonna and wages a one-man against Pablo Escobar.
Al has only addressed the subject of sports once in his complete discography, with “Sports Song”, a hilarious pastiche that adroitly spoofs fight songs, sports fandom and sports, and not from a place of affection or experience either.
Yet in The Soccer Football Movie “Evil Al” Yankovic is so obsessed with soccer, a sport that no one in the United States has ever enjoyed, even a little bit, that he uses his powers as a scientist and Nobel Prize-worthy intellect to drain the talent from some of the top soccer players in the world so that he can become the greatest athlete in the world.
In The Soccer Football Movie Al is a soccer super-fan, a wannabe soccer superstar, evil, a uniquely gifted scientist, and, for good measure, the Mayor of the city where the film takes place. Also, he appears to be about thirty.
He’s an accordion-playing musical superstar who could use his remarkable intellect to serve humanity, the way the real “Weird Al” Yankovic does. Instead he wants to abuse his powers to purloin the talent of top footy stars.
What a jock!
If that sounds an awful lot like the premise of the 1996 animated blockbuster Space Jam that’s because it essentially IS the plot of Space Jam. The Soccer Football Movie is wildly derivative of the Michael Jordan vehicle but I have no affection for Space Jam so I did not mind that it borrows the earlier film’s premise while pumping up the craziness to surreal levels.
The Soccer Football Movie doesn’t just steal shamelessly from Space Jam. It’s equally derivative of Ghostbusters, particularly the new one where the Busters are children.
In The Soccer Football Movie, a quartet of young soccer die-hards sneak into a soccer stadium with an eye towards scoring tickets for the big game. They also very conveniently happen to be exterminators.
This comes in handy when real-life superstar Zlatan Ibrahimovic (voicing himself) receives a mysterious present that turns out to be a brain slug that transforms him into a massive green mutant not unlike the Incredible Hulk.
Ibrahimovic’s signature Ponytail becomes sentient and runs amok. The soccer star’s sentient talking Ponytail (voiced by voiceover superstar Tom Kenny of Spongebob Squarepants and Mr. Show) kicks a soccer ball into Al’s crotch in what, astonishingly, does not qualify as the film’s craziest moment.
The green slugs of doom (also voiced by Kenny) turn extraordinary human beings into crazed monsters while draining them of their talent. The young heroes of The Soccer Football Movie are exterminators by trade, in addition to being soccer super-fans and soccer players and since slugs turn people into monsters that essentially makes them monster-hunters by default.
“Evil Al” does not stop with Ibrahimovic. He next sets his sights on American superstar Megan Rapinoe. I don’t want to say that this children’s movie over-sexualizes the soccer player but watching the film I discovered that my sexual preference is apparently cartoon lesbian athletes.
Rapinoe similarly turns into a giant, glowing green mutant after receiving a sinister gift from Al so the heroes must save their favorite athletes and stop Al from using science for evil ends.
The heroes of The Soccer Football Movie are a forgettable, interchangeable lot. The defining characteristic of one is that they REALLY want to take a selfie with Rapinoe. Another uses a whoopee cushion as a weapon as well as a crude form of amusement.
It seems safe to assume that The Soccer Football Movie is the antithesis of a personal project/labor of love for Al. It seems like the kind of kooky project that he said yes to because they offered to compensate him handsomely for his time but also because it seemed like a fun lark.
Al puts a distinctive stamp on the material by making his larger-than-life bad guy a meta meditation on the nature of cartoon villainy. “Evil Al” embodies what Roger Ebert called The Fallacy of the Talking Killer. That’s a ubiquitous trope where the bad guy inexplicably feels the need to share the details of his evil plan with the good guys in a way that gives them ample time to get away and/or defeat him. “
“Evil Al” here stops just short of putting full-page ads in the newspaper and running commercials on television alerting the general public to the nature of his sinister schemes.
Things just get crazier and crazier until a mutated Al, joined by human-sized brain slugs, is facing off against the heroes in a climactic soccer match before the aforementioned sentient ponytail turns into a Lovecraftian monster.
My wife wandered into our bedroom when I was watching The Soccer Football Movie and, as she frequently does, says, “Wow. That looks terrible” before adding, “You only like it because “Weird Al” is in it.”
She’s not entirely wrong. I probably wouldn’t even think about watching The Soccer Football Movie if it did not star “Weird Al” Yankovic. But I also enjoyed it because it’s only 73 minutes long, has some genuinely clever self-referential gags, is impressively insane and features a version of Al we’ve never seen before and will never see again.
The Soccer Football Movie is an agreeable time-waster for young children, “Weird Al” Yankovic super-fans and deeply stoned adults. It’s just plain weird, and I mean that in a very positive way.
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