By Alistair Harkness

Published 19th Dec 2023, 13:08 BST

Next Goal Wins (12A) **

In one of the first shots in Michael Mann’s Ferrari we see the eponymous Italian car designer giving his own surprisingly drab vehicle a push to silently hill-start it. It’s an unintentionally appropriate image for a film that struggles to get going. Devoid of the juice you might expect the veteran auteur behind Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice to bring to this tale of ruthless ambition and personal calamity, it’s also sorely lacking the tension and intrigue of Mann’s whistleblower drama The Insider. Working from an old script by Troy Kennedy Martin, the long-dead Scottish screenwriter of The Italian Job (he passed away in 2009), he’s made a rather dry historical biopic, one set in the 1950s and revolving around Enzo Ferrari in his later years, for which he’s bizarrely cast an aged-up Adam Driver, who has to dye his hair grey, wear a fake paunch and reignite that combustible accent from Ridley Scott’s outré House of Gucci.

There’s no fun to be had here, though. Stuck behind Enzo’s trademark sunglasses for much of the movie, Driver plays him as cold and detached, a man whose desperation to keep his close-to-bankruptcy family business going so he can push the motor racing envelope is reaching crisis point. At the centre of this crisis is his struggle to reconcile a rash business arrangement he's made with his formidable wife (played by the formidable Penelope Cruz) and his desire to live with the mistress (Shailene Woodley) and young son he’s been secretly supporting for years – a familial mess further complicated by the fact that Enzo and his wife have lost their own son and Enzo longs to make this illegitimate kid his heir.

Which sounds soapy, and it is, albeit in a self-serious way. When the film cuts to the race track, though, there are some properly tense moments, with one early crash genuinely shocking for the way Mann films a body being flung from the car in mid-air, something that prefigures a later tragedy that Mann stages in similarly horrific style. To what purpose, though? The film builds to the 1957 Mille Miglia, a cross-country road race that was never staged again in the same way after one of Ferrari’s drivers crashed, killing nine spectators, including five children. In the run up to the race we see Ferrari goading his drivers to be more daring, but what effect the tragedy has on Enzo is harder to grasp. Mann can’t quite bring himself to indict him and only flirts with fully exposing the unscrupulous, cutthroat mentality that saved the brand. Instead the film just kind of sputters to an unsatisfying halt.

Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins takes the story of the American Samoan football team’s efforts to recover after suffering a humiliating 31-0 defeat in the World Cup qualifiers (the worst ever) and turns it into a schmaltzy underdog sports comedy. Michael Fassbender stars as Thomas Rongen, the former professional footballer turned relentlessly grumpy coach who’s drafted in to help. Arriving with a tonne of emotional baggage, his anger gradually melts as he gets to know this group of lovable losers, who play the sport for the feeling it gives them, not the career opportunities it offers. As with the doc, the transgender player Jaiyah (played by newcomer Kaimana) emerges as the star and is the only other fleshed out character, though even her story fits neatly into film’s predictable template. As for the gags, Waititi gently mocks the story’s inherent white-saviour narrative, but mostly falls back on tiresome fish-out-of-water jokes delivered with his usual irony-drenched self-awareness.

Ferrari and Next Goal Wins are both on general release from 26 December

Film reviews: Ferrari | Next Goal Wins