Review of Victory / 빅토리, directed by Park Beom-soo

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used.

Part of it is fueled by my newfound YouTube addiction, but part of it just is that I can’t stay awake long enough to get everything I want done. I haven’t even been going to the movies lately to see them in-person because I simply am just tired after I get everything else done.

Call this a regular phase of corporate America and adulting, but I want to find a balance and go back more to the things I love. Today’s blog post comes from something I watched on a flight back from Istanbul to Washington. Going to Istanbul I didn’t watch a ton of movies because it was an overnight flight, but coming back I was wide awake and ready to watch as many movies as I could cram in.

Victory stood out to me in the watchlist because it had Hye-ri in it. I’ve honestly quite liked her as an actress so far. The work she’s done suggests to me that she can do a decent job as an actress, even when it can be a bit more of a challenging role. So when I saw the synopsis and her in it, I decided to give this movie a chance.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble before we get to the good stuff.

A group of girls form a cheerleading club for their school’s failing soccer team.

The year is 1999, and at one high school in Geoje, South Korea, sports quite isn’t the focus of its students. Its soccer team is failing miserable, and for Pil-sun and Mi-na, who were held back a year and love to dance, it’s the backdrop of their high school story.

When Se-hyeon transfers into the school with her brother, it changes everything. Pil-sun and Mi-na try to recruit her into their antics of forming a dance club, but they’re doing it under the guise of cheerleading. Se-hyeon actually has experience as a cheerleader at her previous school, which is quite the new sport in Korea at this time.

While the team’s timid goalkeeper keeps professing his love for Pil-sun and fails miserably, a new foe appears on the horizon: Se-hyeon’s brother. A star striker, he’s going to help lead the team to victory—with the help of the new cheerleading squad that the girls have been painstakingly assembling.

The audition process seems a little hopeless and surprising at times when it comes to who and why people are showing up to audition, but then it’s time to start putting together the routines. With Se-hyeon as the captain and leading the crew to new heights, there’s also another problem: Pil-sun’s father’s workplace is facing worker strikes, and her father has to be complicit in everything going on.

There are quite a few layers to this movie because of this B plot, especially because of how he has to serve as a face for the company when he knows the guys working like his brothers. It also shows a different side of Korea to me, as someone who lived there and studied the language, culture, and history. It shows a working class Korea beyond the borders of Seoul—these are people who don’t often fully get representation in these kinds of stories.

As Pil-sun also struggles with the club and her desire to go to Seoul and be a trainee, this film shifts focus and shows how the cheerleading club is not only motivating students and the sports team, but gives the girls involved a new purpose when it comes to their own lives.

Overall Thoughts

I liked this movie and the experience of watching it up in the air, although I don’t know if I would return to it in the near future. I think there were such good themes packed into the B plot involving some of the girls’ fathers and how they were involved with the striking workers, as well as how the girls even performed for the strikes at one point later in the movie.

The romance is in the background and focuses more on the girls’ and their journeys, which is what I prefer. I liked the relationships between the girls being the core focus of the movie, as well as Pil-sun’s own personal journey. Her friend and she tend to have an attitude, but they grow into themselves with the club and new things happening in their lives.

In the end though I found this movie to be cute and great in the moment, but I don’t know if it’s quite memorable. But I’m happy to have watched it. The dialogue is pretty snappy, but it also runs on some school drama and movie cliches that I don’t particularly care for.

I say go watch it if you can find the movie and are interested! I had never seen it available anywhere until I was on that Turkish Airlines flight, but give it a chance if you can find it.

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