One Win 2024
Sinopsis
A former volleyball star, Woo-jin has been struggling to keep his children’s volleyball school that’s about to go out of business. Left without much choice, he agrees to coach a women’s volleyball team that is the unquestioned worst in the league with only secondrate players and an eccentric club owner. According to Woo-jin’s contract, all he needs to do is win just ‘one’ game.
Cast
- Song Kang-ho
- Park Jeong-min
- Kang Jeong-won
- Jang Yoon-ju
- Bang Su-ji
- Park Myung-hoon
- Lee Min-ji
- Cho Jung-seok
- Kim Yeon-koung
- Na Hyun-woo
- Shin Yoon-ju
Review
A promisingly offbeat start soon segues into predictability and cliche in One Win, a sports-themed comedy/drama from South Korea about an underdog women’s volleyball team and their loser coach. The appearance of Song Kang-ho, Academy Award winner for Parasite in 2019 and and Best Actor at Cannes last year for Broker, brings cachet to Shin Yeon-shick’s ninth feature as it world premieres in Rotterdam’s Big Picture competition – especially given how Song is a somewhat choosy performer, averaging just one film a year for the past decade.
It’s not always easy to see why he opted for Shin’s lukewarm screenplay here (the pair are reportedly also teaming up on the director’s upcoming Cobweb). Always watchable, the actor certainly does enjoy copious screen-time as Kim Woo-jin, a middle-aged former player plucked from obscurity to become the new coach of struggling outfit Pink Storm.
Their glory days long behind them (their motto is “Again 1997”), Pink Storm sees an unexpected improvement in their prospects when the team is purchased by eccentric young millionaire Kang (Park Jung-min). Inspired by John G Avildsen’s original Rocky from 1976, the daffy-seeming but perhaps savvy Kang sees Pink Storm as the kind of hapless underdogs who can connect with the public’s affections. He sets his ambitions very low: the one win of the title.
Given this premise, it’s easy to see the coming beats. And when, at the 90-minute mark, Pink Storm begin their final game of the season against all-conquering Black Queens — with whose star player and coach they have simmering beefs — there’s clearly only going to be one outcome. By this stage One Win has segued from mildly zany larkishness to something much closer to conventional sports-picture stuff, with Shin largely content to go through the motions while relying on the easygoing charm of his lead.
Despite the leisurely duration, none of the volleyball players make much of an impression personality-wise — A League of Their Own (1992) this most assuredly is not. Time and again these supposedly professional athletes, several of them seasoned veterans, are presented as over-emotional, immature and prone to screechy squabbling; it’s hard to imagine a female screenwriter would have characterised these women (often referred to as “girls”) in such an outdated manner.
