Diego Maradona **** (2019, Diego Armando Maradona, Claudia Villafañe, Corrado Ferlaino) – Movie Review

Director Asif Kapadia’s hugely enjoyable and informative sport documentary Diego Maradona (2019) gets on the case of an excellent story, and tells it exceptionally well. It is quite a rollercoaster ride, gripping throughout its 130 minutes. It is easy to get swept up the whole hysteria surrounding Maradona’s rise and fall. It is a tragic story, but with the highest of exhilarating peaks.

Kapadia makes a brilliant job of editing it from more than 500 hours of archive footage, much of it never before seen. Diego Armando Maradona, one of the best football players of all time, leaves Argentina for Barcelona, where he is not a success, and then starts playing for Napoli in Southern Italy in the Eighties. The Neopolitans give him a saviour’s welcome. Indeed he is their saviour as well as hero. But then life gets in the way. When the going gets tough, the Italians turn on him big time. He was, at the end of the day, just a straniero (foreigner).

This brilliantly revealing movie tells you almost everything you need to know about football, fame, Italy, the Eighties and the price of success, as Maradona gets submerged in adulation, becomes a god to many, and takes to drugs and partying, all too easily apparently letting cocaine and the Camorra be his downfall.

You don’t need to be a football fan to relish the film. Indeed, non-fans will come to the story fresh and perceive it as an eye-opener.

Kapadia won an Oscar and Bafta for Best Documentary for the 2015 Amy (shared with James Gay-Rees).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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