‘Mexico 86’ Review: Diego Luna Tackles Football Corruption With Wit and Affection in This Netflix Comedy

There’s a certain mischievousness in releasing, just days before the start of a World Cup that will partly be played in that country, a film like Mexico 86 — one that concerns itself primarily with corruption in Mexican football and at FIFA. In case his friend Gael García Bernal’s pointed remarks about the same institution at Cannes left any doubt, it’s now clear that Diego Luna doesn’t hold a particularly high opinion of the people who organize these tournaments, at home or abroad. Yet part of what makes Mexico 86 work is precisely its ironic but ultimately affectionate portrait of the methods Mexicans used to land that World Cup on their soil. And not only that.

Directed by Gabriel Ripstein — who made 600 Miles and is, yes, the son of Arturo — Mexico 86 is a roguish comedy that exaggerates and satirizes what it took to organize an event that, by the film’s account, not only became the greatest World Cup in history (as an Argentine, I won’t argue) but also brought the competition to levels of global reach previously unimaginable. The 1986 World Cup was originally set for Colombia, but political violence and the drug trade forced a change of venue and opened up a scramble among several countries to take its place. Mexico was among them, despite the fact that no country had ever hosted twice — and they had already done it in 1970.

That’s where Martín de la Torre (Luna) comes in, a fictional character who distills several real-life Mexican football federation bureaucrats into one. Consumed by the ambition to get Mexico the tournament and to rise within FIFA’s ranks, he leads an operation that begins with persuading local authorities and eventually moves into more openly transactional territory with voters from other countries. By any means necessary. The competition with the Americans in particular draws out the full playbook: bags of cash, a few dirty tricks, impassioned speeches, and whatever else — legal or not — might get the job done. Later comes the added headache of dealing with the national team coach (Bora Milutinović) and, especially, its star striker Hugo Sánchez, whom the film more than once portrays as a full-blown diva — a detail the former player has not taken well and has complained about publicly.

Mexico 86 keeps the tournament itself and its matches largely in the background, and makes perhaps one unnecessary pivot by dwelling on Martín’s personal life — a romance with a neighbor (Karla Souza) and the complications that follow. More effective is the way Ripstein frames his protagonist as both a corrupt operator and a man with enough nerve to go toe-to-toe with the country’s most powerful figures — titans like media mogul Emilio Azcárraga, played with relish by Daniel Giménez Cacho — and bend them to his will. The film doesn’t even end with the World Cup itself, pressing on to document further murky dealings by the Mexican Football Federation with De la Torre — or whoever that name stands in for — still at the center of things.

Mexico 86 isn’t a great film, but it has the wit to position itself as a story that looks at how World Cups are made with a skeptical eye while never quite losing sight of the passion they ignite in fans around the world. It’s an odd and difficult line to walk, but Luna and Ripstein navigate it well, managing to combine critique with celebration, irony with popular feeling. And they land one joke — which I won’t spoil — about Mexico’s chances of ever winning a World Cup that, forgive me, dear Mexican readers, made me laugh out loud.