[KFCC] YMCA Review

Story: During the time Korea was invaded by Japan soldiers, Hochang lived the life of a scholar destined to follow the path of his father as being a tutor at school. One day, while playing soccer he meets an American missionary who was playing an alien game that immediately got his attention, it was Baseball. Taught by the beautiful Jungrim, a Korean traveling women who was accompanying the missionary at the time, Hochang will soon develop a natural talent at being a very good hitter. Jungrim will then decide to form the first baseball team of Korea history, the YMCA.

Composed by numerous people such as Korean aristocrats, a pair of twins, a politician son, a few simple workers, a mute, a servant, a Japanese pitcher and of course Hochang, the YMCA team will reveal to be an excellent team and will never loose a game of their very first season. But as the Japanese military force is invading Korea, the team will get into trouble, as they will loose their training field. Rivality will then builds between the baseball team and a Japanese military sergeant who was one of the best Japanese baseballs players before he joined the army. A match will then be set, but this match not only means who are the best at baseball but also a cry for freedom from the Korean people.

Review: Korean cinema has now a well known reputation for making a good comedy, but maybe they are pushing the machine a bit too far as it seem that it’s starting to miss some fuel here. YMCA is a rather simple comedy-drama using the very common subject of a sport team. But unlike other recent success of this genre, YMCA has a really serious tone and stayed as far as it could from the slapstick genre and fantasy element. This can be a good feature but unfortunately that really worked against the movie as the movie is interesting to watch but the viewer is always waiting for something incredible to happen.

The story starts with a rather good pace but after the first confrontation with the Japanese army, the movie looses focus and seems to go nowhere trying to develop a rather choppy political background story. It’s not a bad idea trying to put a bit of politics to make a comedy more serious but unfortunately, in this case it was completely useless, as the main point was undeveloped. The baseball team was very fun, especially each member, with a very unique character. They could have pushed this idea of developing the character a lot more as the story progressed but they leave us with too little information and especially with the ending who tried to be too close from the regular family entertainment that we are so used to seeing. The whole story is not bad but it’s a shame that all these good elements together could not have achieved a much better result.

The factor that really saves the movie from being totally boring is certainly the characters. Something that is very common to this kind of sport movie is of course having very unique, stereotyped, weird or interesting characters in the team. The development of these characters was very interesting, even if most of them were very typical, you will still remember easily each one of them at the end of the viewing. Of course the one who gets most of your attention is of course Hochang, played by Song Gang Ho, who is now a master at playing comic character. Very cheerful and full of life, Song Gang Ho really gave a very good performance at portraying his character. It is too bad that later during the movie, the story seem to forget about Hochang and start to focus more on the political characters.

The Japanese baseball and Jungrim the missionary women also consist of the main cast, as these character will start to have a more deep evolvement during the development of the story. The rest of the team didn’t include any other really famous Korean actor but most of them were very well played and none of them was really annoying. All these character together really formed a great team and really make the story believable.

So if the story was decent and the characters were great, what was the real problem then: the humor. Well in fact it is not the humor itself but the editing or the ideas behind the jokes. I’m not Korean, so that matter might be a cultural thing, but I’m very familiar with Asian cinema and especially their comedy. If you have just a bit of intuition, you will easily guess the joke before they happen on screen and most of them are not extremely funny. Most of the time you will end up with a smile on you face but noting more, so don’t expect a slapstick crazy comedy but rather a joyful movie filled with warm humor.

Maybe first time director Hyeon-seok Kim might not be …. But on the other side he knows how to get the best of a cinematographic shoot. The scenery is extremely well shot and the visual are very impressing, which really gave a high quality standard to the movie. There’s as been a lot of first time director coming out of Korea right now, probably because of the big boost that the Korean movie industry is having right now is the main cause. It’s always interesting to see their first work, as it seem that Korean filmmaker put a lot of details on the cinematic vision of their piece of art. But for the comedy genre, it takes something more than just great visual to make a joke or a stunt appear funny to a wide audience, which seem to be what is lacking to the directors vision.

YMCA still has great moments and is a well-made movie, you can easily forget the story flaws during the viewing but it is far from being the best Song Gang Ho comedy. A good heart full comedy but unfortunately is not enough convincing to break the line of being a “must see” Korean production.