One Win

Story: Just before the volleyball team "Pink Storm" is about to be dissolved, the peculiar young businessman Kang Jeong-won (Park Jeong-min) steps in as a buyer. He wants to see the team win as underdogs, just one victory is enough for him. He loves the melodramatic aspect of a story like that, but he has no idea about the sport. That's why he gets coach Kim Woo-jin (Song Kang-ho) on board, whose life story is also full of failure and unfortunate circumstances. He used to have good prospects for a stellar career as a player, but his coach left the team, and so Woo-jin became someone who coaches third-rate school teams here and there. At the moment, he teaches small children, so the request is a good option for him. However, he finds it hard to cope with Kang Jeong-won's peculiarities. Luckily, a friend can get Woo-jin a job at a prestigious university in a year, and coaching experience in the upper league would help with that a lot. He therefore decides to become the coach of Pink Storm, but the team has only lost so far and consists of demotivated players who don't know any of their strengths or weaknesses. After the first expected defeats, disillusionment spreads, but Woo-jin actually has a plan and changes the setup of the entire team. Things are slowly starting to improve, but the team is still far from being able to hold its own against even the weakest of its opponents. And the strongest of the opposing teams is also led by Woo-jin's former coach, who had let him down back in the day.

Review: The well-known formula of a sports movie, in which an "underdog" fights its way to the top, has been adapted so many times in Korea (see "Forever the Moment" or lastly "Dream", to name just a few) that it hardly seems necessary to look at the latest interpretation of a story like that. However, I was surprised to see Song Kang-ho ("Cobweb") in the leading role as I still hadn't heard anything about the movie. Perhaps this is because it was filmed at the beginning of 2021, and due to Covid it did not premiere until the beginning of 2023 at the "International Film Festival Rotterdam", only to then be released in cinemas at the end of 2024. Therefore, the movie is likely to have flown under the radar for most people, especially since volleyball as a sport will probably not appeal to everyone. But you would miss out on something, because thanks to its aesthetics, explosiveness and strategy the sport is used very nicely to capture cinematically improved matches. Unfortunately, you have to get over the introduction first, because at the beginning, it seems as if "One Win" doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be.

If you are looking for an emotional drama with touching dialogs, you will be left a little disappointed here. As the entire tone of the movie is a lot more easy-going than you would expect, and it takes a while until you realize that it wants to take the direction of a comedy. At first, some of the humorous scenes seem a bit odd, but after half an hour at the latest, the comedy has found its rhythm and things are looking better. Still, it has to be said that the movie only has a few real laughs in store. And they are the result of the peculiar behavior of some characters, who sometimes turn out quite colorful, but don't seem too over-the-top that it would make things look cheap. Overall, the movie uses slapstick quite modestly, which might be the reason why it is so difficult to recognize it as a comedy at first. Song Kang-ho isn't really known for his comedic roles either, although he has played quite a few already, or at least was part of some comedies. In the end, it's mainly thanks to his acting, of course, that the movie has a good foundation to build on.

As the owner of the volleyball team also wants to sell the story of the underdog to the media and fans, therefore mirroring the story of the flick on a meta level and making fun of it, the movie steers clear from melodrama, and that was a pretty smart decision, as it sets "One Win" apart from other genre entries. However, the story sometimes seems a bit needlessly overcomplicated. There is the plotline about the coach who dropped our protagonist, two siblings who play in opposing teams, a player who used to bully everyone else and now gets bullied herself, etc. But all this rarely leads anywhere. The latter, of course, is used as a hook for the fact that all players have to pull together if they want to win at some point. Things also get a bit bumpy when it comes to the way Woo-jin wins the players' trust. Suddenly, one of them just opens up to the coach, and you wonder when the director is supposed to have put in the work for this to be believable. As there was no development that would have facilitated this. So, the actors have to save the situation somehow, which they are actually capable of doing, but it's a clumsy approach.

With the volleyball element, things look a lot more positive, though. It is a sport that can be captured quite nicely by the camera, as the space in which everything happens is limited and not too big. And you can understand the rules pretty quickly too if they weren't clear already before. In addition, fast editing manages to give the action a very high pace, but without making you feel disoriented about what is happening. And then you dive even deeper into the subject matter than you would have expected. Because you have to be able to read the opponents and their body language in order to be successful in the sport. Fake-outs and misleading people are also important, and suddenly the coach even uses computer software to analyze old games of his opponents. You will be quite surprised at how complex and strategic volleyball actually is. If you know a thing or two about the sport, you will probably have more fun, but you don't necessarily need to know anything to simply enjoy the movie. Everything is easy to understand, except perhaps why we find ourselves in a situation of a match point so often. And those who are familiar with Korean volleyball will also recognize real stars from the sport in various supporting roles. However, this will probably only be reserved for Korean sports enthusiasts. But the mixture of technique, strategy and action in the sport will definitely work for everyone.

To be honest, I was quite skeptical whether another sports movie - and there are a lot of them at the moment - would be able to offer something really new. And I thought I was proven right when the movie turned out to be a slow starter. But in the end, director Shin Yeon-shik ("Rough Play") manages to give the movie a direction after all. One that refrains from using melodrama and instead rewards you with something that you might have expected, but at least in a less manipulative way. I was particularly surprised by how much focus is on the sport and the matches from the second half onwards, and how well it works. The matches are captured in an exciting way and offer so much suspense that the flick might as well be called an action movie. In any case, it never gets boring. The humor and some nicely implemented characters, e.g. the 40-year-old player, who actually can't see that well anymore but still goes to clubs, round off the movie. "One Win" does not reinvent the genre, but it puts its heart into it, and volleyball as a sport offers an amazingly exciting basis for an entertaining movie.

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