“Champion” Touches Hand in Hand

Release Date：May/18/2018
Genre：Drama/Sport
Director：Yong-wan Kim
Cast：Dong-seok Ma、Kwon Yul、Ye-ri Han

Viola's Rating：8.3

In 1987, Sylvester Stallone’s “Over the Top” came out, and 30 years later, a Korean version of the action-packed journey was released on May 18, 2018. As dramatic as most sports feature films, “Champion” provides you not only the exciting and exhilarating parts of arm-wrestling, but also touches you with its “hand-in-hand” experience.

As a sports drama, “Champion” describes how a Korean American arm wrestler, Mark, (Dong-Seok Ma) goes back to South Korea for a tournament, which can return him back to glory, and finds a family that he didn’t know about.

After acting in “The Outlaws” and “Train to Busan”, Ma has been celebrated worldly that he even landed a cameo role in “Sense 8” for one episode before the aforementioned works. Although not being a fine figure of a man, with Ma’s usually warm-hearted characters, he has accumulated many aficionados who would love to see him on the big screen. Throughout the film, Ma’s appearance has been made fun of, but not in a discriminating way, but in a comical way by his niece, Joon-Hee. Her cuteness is seen all over “Champion”, and the audience just can’t help but laughing at her kids talk.

Being a sport that only requires hands, arm-wrestling actually contains many techniques that moviegoers get to take a peak in “Champion”. Besides the competition scenes, there are more shots related to “hands” in the flick, as symbols as brotherhood and family love.

Since the main character is a Korean American, it’s very clever for the crew to cast Ma since he himself is a Korean American. Also talking about one’s identity, “Champion” presents immigrants’ struggle with citizenship and language uses naturally.

Along with the identity matter, as a sports motion picture, “Champion” honors sportsmanship as well. In the movie, you get to see how professional players admire each other’s amazing skills and become friends afterwards.

Besides the abovementioned subjects, relationship isn’t absent in “Champion”. Korean pictures are good at making its audience burst into tears, and “Champion” is no exception, except that it doesn’t fall into the cliché storyline. All the climax, disappointments and tear-driven parts are quite unexpected, but not too exaggerated, either. It stops right at the point after you drop a few drops of tears.

Unlike other sports pictures such as “Dangal!” and “Messi” which emphasize on one or two real-life characters, “Champion” is fictional, while at the same time, it doesn’t give you the feeling that everything in it is fake, especially the excitement of the tournament and how hard the characters try to win. Korean motion picture fans as well as sports lovers will enjoy and be touched by “Champion”.

Picture Credit: IMDb