Written by: Susan Granger
www.susangranger.com

While it attempts to be a family drama, love story, and buddy picture, there's not one original thought or non-cliché line in this success story of a Mexican soccer player.

Talented athlete Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) has emigrated with his family from Mexico to Los Angeles. His hard-working father (Tony Planta) urges him to forget about sports but when nimble Santiago is spotted by a former soccer scout (Stephen Dillane), he's offered the opportunity of a lifetime: trying out for Newcastle United, one of England's top clubs.

Directed by Danny Cannon ("Judge Dredd," TV's "CSI"), the screen only comes alive on the field where some of the game's real-life stars show up - like David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and Alan Shearer. Perhaps that's because four credited screenwriters - British Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais ("The Commitments"), working from a story by Mike Jefferies & Adrian Butchart - take too many ambitious sub-plot shots. The father-son relationship-on-the-rocks is plodding and predictable, while the love story is formulaic. The result is a soccer-theme soap opera, perhaps timely and relevant only in the way it presents America's neglect of undocumented workers.

It's really too bad that soccer, the world's most popular sport, has never scored at the movies, particularly if you recall Sylvester Stallone's goalkeeper in John Huston's wacky "Victory," a World War II drama in which a team of Allied soldiers played the Nazis. Nevertheless, the producers have already filmed a second "Goal" installment.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Goal! The Dream Begins" misses the net with a tedious 4. It's yet another inspirational but insipid underdog tale.