Well, the first big Italian homegrown box office success of 2008 boasts a handful of extremely familiar names for any afficionado of Italian genre cinema. L’allenatore nel pallone 2 features Anna Falchi (from Dellamorte dellamore), comedy giant Lino Banfi (from too many films to mention) and Urs Althaus (from the Name of the Rose). More importantly, it marks a return to cinema for director Sergio Martino; the very same Sergio Martino who gave us treats such as Next, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Mountain of the cannibal God and so on. Sergio, who’s 70 this year, has kept himself busy on television in recent years, but his last feature film was 1999s little seen Mozart was a Murderer.
L’allenatore nel pallone 2 is a sequel to the 1984 film, made by Banfi and Martino, and God knows why they decided to follow it up some 24 years later. It’s a football comedy, with Banfi as a hapless manager, and features a number of famed soccer stars (Alessandro Del Piero, Gennaro Gattuso, Francesco Totti). I can’t really imagine that it will make it to the international markets, but it’s nice to see Martino’s still having some success (it made just under 3.6 million from 510 screens), so all power to it!