BERLIN: A behind-the-scenes documentary film about Germany's successful campaign to win the 2014 football World Cup in Brazil pulled in the crowds in Germany on its opening weekend, despite woeful reviews.

Critics assailed “Die Mannschaft” (The Team) as a sugar-coated, corporate PR-style production, a far cry from a more critical and stirring movie by independent filmmaker Soenke Wortmann about the 2006 World Cup, which Germany hosted.

But that didn't stop 420,000 people from packing cinemas, according to distributor Constantin, to see forward Thomas Mueller serving teammates in a pink Bavarian dirndl dress after losing a bet, and his fellow striker Lukas Podolski pushing a reporter into a pool.

The 85-minute film, which premiered on Thursday on 600 of Germany's 2,000 cinema screens, includes some of the key moments of Germany's six wins and one draw en route to winning the cup with a 1-0 victory over Argentina.

But it also has many tedious scenes of coach Joachim Loew looking moody as he walks along a beach, and of players fiddling with mobile phones while lying around the pool or waiting in airport lounges.

“It's shallow, banal and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know,” wrote Fabian Scheler in the national weekly Die Zeit. “It's nothing more than 90 minutes of uncritical self-congratulation.”

“There's nothing new in this film - unless you're interested in knowing what Philipp Lahm ate for breakfast after the final or how Mario Goetze plays table tennis,” wrote Spiegel Online critic Peter Ahrens.

“What you see over and over again is players staring down at their smartphones.”

The German football federation made the film, hoping to repeat the success of Wortmann's 2006 documentary “Deutschland: ein Sommermaerchen” (Germany: A summer fairy tale), which 4 million people saw in German cinemas.

But that picture, which also captured something of the party atmosphere that surrounded the 2006 tournament, even though the hosts only came third, had a far more successful opening weekend with more than 1 million tickets sold.

Wortmann gave audiences glimpses of mild-mannered striker Miroslav Klose - who this year became the top goalscorer in World Cup finals history - getting annoyed with a Munich hairdresser because she doesn't know who he is, and then-coach Juergen Klinsmann furious at being thrashed at table tennis by an assistant.