Pelé: Birth of a Legend

Inspiration, old-fashioned style, is the main course being served in Pelé: Birth of a Legend. In essence commissioned by the soccer icon, who is credited as one of the picture’s executive producers, “Pelé” is hagiography. But appealing hagiography.

Pelé: Birth of a Legend is too earnest and single-minded to be hagiographic, and the final moments are moving in spite of their predictable trajectories.

A well-meaning and sometimes interesting effort written and directed by brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist.

A sometimes entertaining, dazzling-on-the-field biography built around an utterly colorless lead performance.

The film’s director of photography, Matthew Libatique, makes “Pelé” more than an eye-moistening anthem for a built-in global audience.

The beautiful game, as Pelé called football (or soccer to us Americans), has never felt like such a sedate slog.

Who knows what Pelé: Birth of a Legend could have been had it tapped more into that mysterious life force and the true messiness in harnessing it and making it glorious. Instead we get what the man himself was canny enough to ignore: a familiar game plan tediously followed.