With the football season returning (did it ever go away this year?), this is the perfect time to release The Unbeatables, a children’s CGI animation revolving around Foosball, which is one of the alternate titles, the pic being an Argentinian / Spanish / Indian / USA co-production, two of which’s host nations are great at football, one of which ain’t bad, and another who are probably wondering what size bat you’d need to hit a ball that big. We’ll leave you to work out who’s who. What may be the biggest surprise about all this is the fact that the director and co-writer is Juan José Campanella, the helmer of the superb Argentinian drama / thriller The Secret In Their Eyes, a brilliant piece of work which certainly isn’t intended for children. To be honest, the script, credited to six writers, seems a bit complex for a kiddie movie, is set in the small village where young Amadeo (Rupert Grint, forever Ron in the Harry Potter series) lives, he being a champion at table football, and there is no one nearly good enough to challenge him, but the truth is while he is great with the version of the game with the little wooden men on bars, he’s terrible at the real thing, and his real life is so chaotic and hopeless that he’s unable to tell Lara (Fern Deacon - TV’s The Secret Of Crickley Hall), the young girl he is in love with, just what he feels about her. He just stays in the small, quiet village, one highlight being when he beats the village bully Flash (Anthony Head - TV’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer) at table football. The years pass and Flash is now a football superstar, for real, a Galactico famous throughout the world, and uses his position to get revenge on the village, flattening it to build his own Football Academy, breaks the football table and makes off with Lara. Now this is where the script may deviate from reality somewhat, since when Flash, in tears, cries on the remnants of the broken table, Skip (Ralf Little - TV’s Two Pints Of Lager....) the captain of the table football players comes to life and together with other key football players, Rico (Rob Brydon - The Trip / The Trip To Italy) and Loco (Peter Serafinowicz - Couples Retreat), they set off to persuade Amadeo. The lunacy of that final plot twist aside, the animation is certainly appealingly designed and extremely colourful, while the EGL version voice cast is simply superb, also including Alistair McGowan (TV’s Bleak House / Mayo), Alex Norton (TV’s Taggert), David Schneider (Arthur Christmas / TV’s Uncle Max) and Eve Ponsonby (TV’s The White Queen), so it also seems that there is enough plot to keep anybody not unutterably obsessed with football interested as well, and the casting of Anthony Head as the villainous Flash is brilliant, his role on the superb BBC Radio series Bleak Expectations being a masterclass in how to voice a deeply sinister, villainous character.
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