‘One Win’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr: Shin Yeon-shick. South Korea. 2023. 115 mins.

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.

Always watchable, Song Kang-ho certainly does enjoy copious screen-time

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hard to imagine a female screenwriter would have characterised these women (often referred to as “girls”) in such an outdated manner.

It’s also odd that no attempt is made to connect Pink Storm with any town or city, real or fictional: no location is mentioned, this is just Anywheresville, South Korea. Events seem to be unfolding in a bubble, onto which the outside world cannot impinge; nobody ever refers to any other sport or athlete. And it all (apart from an ill-advised 2024-set coda) takes place in an alternate-reality 2020/2021, one where the Covid-19 pandemic never happened.

Handled with anonymous professionalism in most areas and featuring distractingly conspicous product-placement for Korean-owned sportswear giant Fila throughout, One Win’s appeal is blunted rather than enhanced by a noodling comedic score that frequently feels like a temp-track. Shin also interpolates found music at two crucial intervals: a rather random use of The Who’s 1971 stomper ‘Baba O’Riley’ (aka ’Teenage Wasteland’), during a dramatic match; and for the supposedly rousing finale (just in case anyone in the audience has somehow missed the point) Bill Conti’s inspirational instrumental ‘Going the Distance’ from the equivalent sequence in Rocky.