The film-makers may have been granted unprecedented access to the inner circle of one of the world’s top footballers, Cristiano Ronaldo, but the result, a carefully controlled and meticulously sanitised hagiography, is as airbrushed and groomed as its subject. One imagines that entry into Ronaldo’s gilded world cost multi-Bafta-winning director Anthony Wonke much of the creative freedom that he would usually expect on a project.
The film explores the Madeira-born soccer star’s early life, with insights into his unfulfilling relationship with his alcoholic father, who died from cirrhosis of the liver in 2005. We get to see some stage-managed father-son bonding between Ronaldo and the child he had with an unknown mother in 2010.
But other aspects of the footballer’s life – personal relationships, scandals – remain strictly off-limits. As such, this is for fans only. Unlike Senna, for example, this is not a film that will interest anyone remotely ambivalent about the sport in question.
