Hacker: Five Go Down to South Africa

After spitting at the avaricious yet prodigious Rooney and the fact that both Old Firm clubs had 100 per cent league records up to the point when they met one another - rendering the Scottish Premier League beyond the joke it already was - I swallow my spittle and lick the sugar-coated lollipop of Africa United, the movie you may have seen advertised in bright colours on Edinburgh’s buses in recent weeks.

Rwandan orphans Dudu and Beatrice - the former sporting an Arsenal shirt with Fabregas on the back beneath an oversized suit, the latter making statements about wanting to be a doctor - set off with football starlet Fabrice (Liverpool jersey, Torres) to South Africa in order to join the titular team of talented youngsters scouted by a FIFA representative to open the World Cup. Follow your dream, the film tells us all, and don’t give it up in the face of guns and violence (or fewer tax breaks). When Fabrice is told by his stern mother that Africa is dreaming too much and needs to wake up, the audience sees the gangly youth – who in reality had had a trial with Norwich City FC and, when going through the directory, was easy to spot (remember the name: Roger Nsengiyumva) – cast off his privileges to perfect his Cruyff turn rather than his turns of phrase.

For bored sisters dragged along at the behest of their Hibs-mad brothers, Beatrice’s plight is moving in depicting the humility and compassion of an Africa still zealous with the missionary spirit, and the constant references to team spirit, tactics and footie in general make Africa United a film which, without saying football can change everything, suggests that an alternative to the status quo is possible if the continent, and by extension the rest of us, fosters the hopes of the young.

There’s pathos in addressing child soldiers, and it’s a coup to get Emmanuel Jal, who used to be one and who now raps about his experiences, as one of the older persecutors of young Foreman George, whom the three Rwandans have met while in DR Congo. Picking up Celeste, a girl who serves drinks to perverts at an exclusive resort, the famous five trade banter and meaningful glances while singing P-Square’s song 'Do Me' in the back of a truck. Dudu, who has enough hope and audacity to fill his homeland itself, clutches his briefcase and spouts amusing lines with wide eyes, refuting Fabrice’s attribution of various players to animals. Friendship, the old kids’ film standby, is all present and correct in Africa.

I gasped when something happened to Fabrice’s mobile phone and at the mangy lion which accosts the kids, and cried at the resolution at the end of the film, while I cheered and laughed at the incident with the South African border patrol which, though completely unworkable given the tight security in June 2010, enforced the make-believeablility of the tale. Recent Labour leadership Diane Abbott was with her kids in the front row and revealed she had wept too, so I can prove that politicians have a human side; although, I did see the film the day the Comprehensive Spending Review more or less put paid to the ambition of this type of film. Perhaps Ms Abbott was immersing herself in another world, a fantasy adventure that brings back Blyton to Generation Wii, where kids could roam free (indeed, robbed by HIV/AIDS) of parental guidance, and where Lieutenant George could be shot by Foreman George before he had time to announce the death of British cinema.

Africa United is a feel-good 90 minutes (I wonder if they planned it that way) of adventure/journey/issue-based fictional documentary. Kids are welcome too, and will enjoy hearing The Ting Tings mix with mbalax while seeing how the pubescent mood swing is translated into cinema; the tone shifts more often than a useless X Factor hopeful. Some may complain of triteness but, overall, cliché is eschewed in favour of sentiment and adventure.

With even Sir Alec Ferguson bowing to money and the collective cause this season, Rooney making himself a cross between Cantona, John Terry and Peter Stringfellow in terms of his public perception, spare a thought for the incorruptible Good Hope and catch Africa United before Harry Potter whizzards along.