Goal - Movie Review
Published: March 17, 2011
Starring John Abraham, Bipasha Basu, Arshad Warsi, Boman Irani
A compelling, simple story about a community—the South Asians of Southall, an area of London known as "Little India"—a losing football club on the verge of demise, and a conflicted footballer grappling with his ethnic identity, Goal keeps the melodrama—always a big aspect of sports films—to a minimum, for the most part, in favor of low-key realism.
John Abraham, in one of his better roles, plays Sunny—an arrogant athlete and a self-loathing South Asian. Sunny balks at his immigrant father's insistence that he accept his marginalized place in the Western world. Sunny considers himself fully British and is so embarrassed of his origins that he throws a beer bottle through the window of an Indian restaurant (he breaks his nose leaving the scene, which becomes a liability later in a decisive game). He has tons of talent and knows it, but his defensiveness about his background prevents him from being a team player. When he gets a chance to try out for a top football club, he showboats on the field and a player hurls a slur at him. He doesn’t make the cut and he assumes it’s ethnically motivated. Embittered, he begrudgingly joins Southall's football club, which desperately needs a star player, but he still insists on dominating at the expense of the team—which puts him at odds with the captain, Shaan (Arshad Warsi).
Shaan runs the Indian restaurant Sunny defaced and he's trying valiantly to save the football club from being shuttered (they have no sponsors or spectators because they're terrible). He hires disgraced former Southall player Tony Singh (Boman Irani) to be the coach. His sister Rumana (Bipasha Basu) is the team doctor and she gets involved with Sunny, which is another source of conflict between the two men. Shaan is also a little jealous of Sunny's ability since Shaan used to be the star of the team.
A football commentator with an underhanded agenda lures Sunny away from Southall with a lucrative contract to play for a better team, which shatters his teammates and Rumana and compromises Southall's comeback. In the meantime, Tony has to exorcise his demons from the past and Sunny's father has telling secrets that come to light.
The director, Vivek Agnihotri, has announced there will be a sequel with the same principal cast.
Goal is rated Worth Watching.
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