Cristiano Ronaldo’s biopic could have been great. Instead, it’s just an advertisement.

He’s not wrong. Outside on the red carpet, while Alex Ferguson and Carl Froch and various other luminaries were arriving, Ronaldo took a moment to stand still and hold out his phone, while breathless fans were ushered past him at a rapid clip. In, clinch, grin and move on, while the man himself stood there with his teeth bared, pumping out selfies like sausages.

Sadly, this is not the interesting film that is waiting to be made about the nature of fame at its most extreme; such moments are present, but remain un-interrogated, used for garnish or comic relief. As for the “Intimate,” well, we learn about Ronaldo’s family. We learn that his father drank himself into an alcoholic’s early grave; we learn that his brother avoided the same fate and is now in charge of Ronaldo’s business projects. We learn that Jorge Mendes, perhaps the most powerful agent in world football, is in effect a surrogate father figure for Ronaldo, and we learn that Ronaldo apparently spends most of his free time playing with his adorable son, Cristiano, Jr., whose mother has never been and will never be identified.

The price of access, however, is context, of which the film has precious little. There is no input of any substance from outside Ronaldo’s circle, and although he stresses the importance of friends as well as family, he also acknowledges that he likes to isolate himself from the world when he’s not out on the pitch. At times it seems as though his only friend is Mendes, and notable by their absence are any voices from Manchester United or Real Madrid, be they managers or other players. As such, there is no shape to the story. Ronaldo was born into these circumstances, says the film, and Ronaldo worked hard. Ronaldo believed, and so Ronaldo became the best footballer in the world.

It’s a deeply strange decision; if sport is good for anything, it’s for generating story lines. Much was made in the promotional material of the connections between Ronaldo and 2010 documentary Senna; the latter’s director is the former’s executive producer. But where Senna was built around the fascinating and bilious duel between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, which saw them exchange World Championships and bitter insults before Senna’s untimely death, Ronaldo and Messi are clashing over an individual bauble in a team sport, one that is awarded halfway through a season and on the basis of a largely unclear set of criteria. The film works desperately hard to make this matter, but it fails, not least because there’s very little to suggest that Messi himself gives too much of a toss either way.

Perhaps this was the choice of the subject rather than the director, and certainly it does nothing to dispel the myth of Ronaldo as rampant egoist. Indeed, the film makes no attempt to argue otherwise; presumably those in charge know a lost cause when they see one. But while Ronaldo’s faith in his own self-evident magnificence is often amusing, it is also quite disarmingly guileless, even innocent. Talking before the film to Gary Neville, he answered a question about his own self-belief by averring that it was necessary; it is how he understands human development to function. By believing he was the best, by working at all times to be the best, he became the best; he reconfigured himself into a perpetual motivation machine. It’s not an indulgence, or a delusion, but a necessity. And to give him his due, it seems to have worked.

While that softens the film’s central character somewhat, it doesn’t save it from the fact that this is a vanity project. It fails as a sports film because it doesn’t show us enough about how the footballer became the footballer, or shape itself around any footballing achievement or story of true import, and it fails as a character study because it doesn’t ask enough questions or find enough depth. There are interesting moments in here, in between the lingering shots of absurd luxury, and there are hints of a deeper, stranger film waiting to be made. Perhaps there’s a story to be told of Ronaldo the isolated ultra-celeb, taking himself off to bed at the same time as his son because there’s nobody in his beautiful house to talk to. Or Ronaldo the obsessive, sculpting his body into ever more Adonistic shapes as he chases The Adversary, The Short One, The Argentine. Those stories, however, probably wouldn’t get a filmmaker invited into their subject’s home. And they might not be fair; Ronaldo, though terrifyingly driven, does not seem unhappy.

Instead, we have the ultimately rather ponderous story of a footballer who worked hard and believed, and who through that hard work and belief achieved everything he ever wanted to achieve. It is impossible not to admire Ronaldo as a footballer; he is, to borrow Rob Smyth’s lovely phrase, perhaps the sport’s most preeminent “freak of nurture.” But this film skates lightly over anything too idiosyncratic and at all points chooses the simpler path, eventually coming to rest as a 90-minute advertorial for CR7^TM. To go back to that first question, where Senna was made because the story demanded it, Ronaldo was made because its subject desired it. And while it manages to reflect that desire, it sadly fails to do much of anything else.