Saipan Film Review: World Cup Woes

The infamous Saipan incident is dramatised in this well-recreated if somewhat unambitious nostalgia fest from Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn.

Steve Coogan takes on the role of Mick McCarthy, the Yorkshireman and former Ireland international tasked with managing a team that’s just scraped through to the finals in South Korea and Japan. From the off his relationship with captain and Manchester United star Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) is frosty, and everyone, the press included, knows it. The situation is only exacerbated when the squad arrives on the Pacific island of Saipan for a pre-tournament training camp with no footballs and an unusable pitch. 

Keane is an English and European champion with United, a cut above the rest, so while his teammates are happy to drink, play golf, and munch on less-than-nutritious cheese sandwiches as they wait for their equipment to turn up, that won’t cut it for the skipper. This dramatisation from Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn captures the ensuing fallout, a tête-à-tête between two domineering men with different views on what the tournament represents for their team and country.

Both Keane and McCarthy are still prominent figures in the Anglo-Irish football world, and with two iconic personalities like these the risk of caricature is high. Luckily, we needn’t worry. Coogan is a known quantity in this arena, having previously mastered the specific accents and mannerisms of Tony Wilson and Jimmy Savile among others. His McCarthy is comically hapless without being implausibly inept, boasting a note-perfect Barnsley drawl (at least to these north-west English ears). 

Hardwicke, meanwhile, demonstrates remarkable range by playing the ultimate football hardman in Keane; he previously broke through as the snivelling psychopath Ben Field in the true crime drama The Sixth Commandment, a role lightyears away from this one. Here he is intimidating and pitiful in equal measure, a lit fuse that burns with increasing intensity until the explosion in the film’s climax.

We are transported back in time thanks to some superbly authentic hair styling and costuming, reinforced by a soundtrack of Oasis and The Stone Roses. These two Manchester bands have been used in plenty of media to evoke the ‘90s and early ‘00s, but in this case they serve a greater purpose, as a reminder of the shadow Keane’s life and career in the city cast over the action. The Gallagher brothers in particular pertain to the theme of identity that crops up throughout, as Englishmen famously proud of their Irish lineage, like McCarthy.

Keane isn’t shy to weaponise what he views as his boss’s dubious Irish credentials during their fights, but in a nation historically marked by emigration and the fight for self-determination, it’s complicated to say the least. Barros D’Sa and Leyburn reopen an intriguing debate, but they lose their nerve as the film goes on and the subject is left only partially excavated.

Fundamentally, while the real-life scandal sparked months of media discussion and national soul-searching, the actual events that constituted it don’t justify a feature-length adaptation. By the fourth or fifth row, we’re going round in circles with the same insults and arguments being presented in increasingly foul-mouthed fashion. Nor does the film look all that cinematic; Piers McGrail‘s photography is perfectly competent, but more suited to the small screen than big. Even so, for those who remember the infamous incident, it’s hard not to relish in the images and sounds of the time, nor in seeing these familiar faces reinterpreted by such a charismatic duo.

Saipan had its World Premiere at TIFF on September 4, 2025. The film will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 13.