Fifa film flops: United Passions ill-timed 'cinematic excrement'

After the scandal comes the humiliation for Fifa, as a vanity film about the organisation's history bombs at the US box office amid howls of derision. United Passions, starring Tim Roth, Gerard Depardieu and Sam Neil, is thought to have cost Fifa £17m, but took less than £500 on its opening weekend in the US, and could set a new benchmark in the history of cinematic catastrophes.

The ill-starred movie, completed before football's world governing body was torpedoed by an FBI corruption probe, has been crucified by the critics who have dismissed it as "squirm-inducing propaganda" and "cinematic excrement".

United Passions is perhaps "the most ill-timed cinematic release in history", scoffs The Guardian. The film opened in America just days after US prosecutors charged nine Fifa officials with racketeering, money laundering and fraud to spark the crisis that forced the resignation of Fifa's president, Sepp Blatter.

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The film, which stars Roth in the role of Blatter, was made with an estimated £15m to £17m of Fifa money, and was intended as a hagiography of football's governing body, apparently designed to coincide with last year's World Cup in Brazil.

It had its premiere at Cannes in 2014, where it failed to trouble the judges, and had a very limited release in Europe, earning around £4,000 in Portugal and £1,660 in Serbia according to The Independent. Now it has been given a limited US release across ten screens on the weekend, but took a pathetic total of $607 on its opening weekend. One cinema in Phoenix reportedly took $9, equivalent to one ticket.

The current Fifa scandal has no doubt added to the film's crushing failure, but even before its release, comedian John Oliver had lampooned it, asking: "Who makes a sports film where the heroes are the executives?"

Adding to its woes, critics have been damning about the film's artistic merit and entertainment value.

Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian calls it "pure cinematic excrement" and a "preposterous hagiography". Even without the current headlines, United Passions is a "disgrace", says Hoffman, although it does offer a cautionary tale. "As proof of corporate insanity it is a valuable case study," he says.

Most US critics agree. In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Rechtshaffen describes United Passions as a "bloated, talky epic" with a Europudding of accents producing "a squirm-inducing heap of propaganda".

The Village Voice calls it "as subtle as an anvil to the temple". And in the New York Times, Daniel M Gold dubs it "one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory, a dishonest bit of corporate-suite sanitising that's no good even for laughs".

Gold notes that even though the film was made before the most recent scandals broke, there is "barely a nod to the corruption scandals that have plagued Fifa for decades". When Roth as Blatter assumes command of Fifa in the story, he is "shocked to find affairs in disarray and tells his executive committee there's a new sheriff in town".

Many of the lines, adds Gold, "seem scripted by a legal defence team". He doesn't let the director, Frederic Auburtin, or the actors off the hook either. If cynicism were a crime, he says, they would be taking "a perp walk of their own".

The producers are yet to announce a UK release date for United Passions, but after its dismal US outing, play might be delayed indefinitely.