Danny Cannon has scored with his new movie about soccer

For decades, film critics and sports enthusiasts have complained about our cinemas being filled with stories of baseball and American football, and the virtual absence of anything halfway decent or on a large scale about the most popular game of all, football. Ask any critic what is the best football match in a British movie and they'll say the one refereed by Brian Glover in Ken Loach's Kes, and what is the most absurd sports film ever and they're likely to name John Huston's prison-camp flick, Victory.

Now, at last, we have a big-budget soccer movie, Goal! The work of a British director and British writers, though with a Mexican hero (Kuno Becker) and the principal British football star impersonated by an American (Alessandro Nivola).

The first film in a trilogy, Goal! is much superior to the recent and comparable Wimbledon, but much inferior to the equally comparable Cinderella Man. It's essentially a soft-centered fairy story that pulls out every predictable stop and pulls in every sports movie cliche. The hero, Santiago Munez, a naive 20-year-old Mexican wetback, is spotted playing for an amateur team in Los Angeles by an idealistic former Newcastle United star (Stephen Dillane). With the help of his grandma, but opposed by his hard-working father, Munez heads for a trial at Newcastle and a shot at the big time.

There are setbacks due to a hostile Scottish fellow player, the lad's difficulty in adapting to the British weather, a foolish decision to conceal his asthma and a compromising photograph on the front page of The Sun. But within a matter of weeks, he's in the first team, playing alongside Alan Shearer and, in the last minute of the last game of the season, he's given the opportunity to score from a free kick with the score 2-2. Well, no movie-goer wants to see a winning goal scored in the first five minutes.

The most striking visuals come with sweeping helicopter shots of the elegant bridges on the photogenic Tyne, ending up at St. James' Park, a building in this context as grand as the Colosseum. These are more impressive than the computer-enhanced games themselves. And everyone -- the fans, the other players, the staff, the spectators -- are kind and warm-hearted, with the exception of a self-seeking agent (Sean Pertwee) who has no real love for the game.

The chief pussycat is the philosophical, paternalistic German manager, an Arsene Wenger figure very well played by Marcel Iures. He does everything short of tucking up his players in bed with: "Auf Wiedersehen, pet." This is an odd omission because the screenplay is by the Los Angeles-based British sitcom team of Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, authors of the Geordie comedy series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

For many people, the highlight of the movie will be David Beckham approaching the hero at a post-match party in London to say: "Santiago, you were great today."