3 zéros (2002) - film review

Football enthusiast Manu sees himself as a talent spotter and sets his sights on a young soccer player, Tibor, with whom he once shared a prison cell.  Having learnt that Tibor has signed up with a football club, Manu contrives, with the help of recruitment godfather Colonna, to have him released so that he play in the French national team.  The scheme succeeds and Tibor and Manu are soon drawn into the world of professional football…

An obvious marketing gimmick of the most cynical kind (released to coincide with the 2002 Soccer World Cup in which France had high hopes of repeating its 1998 victory), 3 zéros is a film that may appeal to football enthusiasts but which is unlikely to have any interest for anyone with no interest in the game.  As in Fabien Onteniente’s previous over hyped comedy Jet Set (2002), the film has the thinnest of narrative threads borne by a set of the most uninteresting, overly caricatured characters.   It isn’t the fact that film has next to no narrative content and is so lamentably dull that makes it so unwatchable.  It’s the fact that this is such an obvious example of a film production company trying to rake in easy money with the minimal amount of effort.   Would this film have been made after the French team had been so humiliatingly defeated in the 2002 World Cup?  Je crois que non.

© James Travers 2006

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