Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
His teachers, coaches, childhood friends and Barça teammates, together with journalists, writers and prominent figures from the history of football, come together in a restaurant to analyze and pick apart Messi's personality both on and off the field, and to look back at some of the most significant moments in his life. Viewed from Álex de la Iglesia's unique perspective, Messi recreates the player's childhood and teenage years, from his very first steps, with a football always at his feet, through to the decision to leave Rosario for Barcelona, the separation from his family, and the role played in his career by individuals such as Ronaldinho, Rijkaard, Rexach and Guardiola.
This documentary on Lionel Messi brings together an impressive array of voices — teammates, coaches, journalists — and benefits from Álex de la Iglesia's distinctive directorial sensibility, giving it a slightly more cinematic and stylized feel than a standard sports doc. The narrative arc covering Messi's Rosario childhood, his growth hormone treatment, and his ascent through Barcelona's system is compelling source material well-organized chronologically. However, the talking-heads-in-a-restaurant framing device, while novel in concept, feels a bit stilted in execution and the participants are often more reverential than genuinely revealing. Cinematography is competent with some nice archival integration but nothing breathtaking. The ending, arriving as Messi is still at the height of his powers in 2014, feels necessarily incomplete — more a pause than a conclusion. Overall a solid but not definitive portrait of one of sport's greatest figures.