DISNEY - MOVIE REVIEWS: GOAL! THE DREAM BEGINS

With soccer interest growing as the start of the World Cup approaches on June 9, here comes one of those Disney inspirational flicks about an unlikely candidate for sports stardom making it to the top. Goal! The Dream Begins concerns a young Mexican immigrant living in L.A. whose father thinks he should invest his savings into a truck for a gardening business rather than squander it on a trip to England to try out with one of that country's top teams. Desson Thomson in the Washington Post writes that this is the kind of movie "in which phrases like 'dare to dream' amount to a holy mantra." Stephen Witty in the Newark Star-Ledger remarks: "Time to trot out the timeworn homilies about teamwork: Start the slow-motion cameras, and cue the orchestra." The script, writes Ty Burr in the Boston Globe is "so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco." Still, there's no denying the success of Costco, and as Gene Seymour observes in Newsday: "To begrudge Goal! The Dream Begins for being pushy, sentimental and predictably rousing is to indict generations of aspiring athletes for drawing spiritual nourishment from juvenile sports books, movies and TV shows." And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times suggests that it's easy to overlook the film's clichés. He concedes that it contains "all the usual elements, arranged in the usual ways, and yet it's surprisingly effective."

12/05/2006