A cranky footballer’s temper has cost him his place in the league, and he’s got to find a way to rehabilitate his image. In Dream, a Korean sports comedy-drama now on Netflix, Park Seo-joon stars as the reluctant coach of a team in the Homeless World Cup, an unexpected role that might be his only way back to respectability. Can he turn his team into a winner, and conquer his demons in the process?
The Gist: Dream sets up a rehabilitation arc familiar in sports movies. Korean film star Park Seo-joon co-headlines as Yoon Hong-dae, a footballer forced out of the league after assaulting a reporter. His PR team cooks up a solution: he’ll take over as coach of South Korea’s team in the Homeless World Cup (a real event), and Lee So-min (played by K-Pop star IU) will make a film about him doing it. Those two are the name stars, but there’s a deep ensemble cast filling out the ranks of his soon-to-be team.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The bones of Dream are your basic live-action Disney sports movie–a feel-good story with a curmudgeonly character in need of rehabilitation. Think Gordon Bombay in The Mighty Ducks.
Performance Worth Watching: The ostensible protagonist is Park Seo-joon’s wayward soccer star, but the story crackles to life with the sunny screen presence of Lee Ji-eun (also known as the K-Pop star IU), who shines as the documentary filmmaker tasked with bringing his rehabilitation story to television.
Memorable Dialogue: “You take your meds on time?”, Yoon Hong-dae asks gruffly of Lee So-min as she cheerfully describes the roster they’ve assembled. “I’m like this because I can’t afford any,” she giggles in return. This should give you an idea of the often sitcom-level banter that runs through Dream.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Dream gets down to business quickly. In the first five minutes of the film, we see Yoon Hong-dae playing in a professional soccer game. It’s energetic, lively game footage–something many sports movies struggle to produce–and it shows him as a fiery, fierce player who runs hard and does not smile. Shortly thereafter, we see him in a post-game press conference, being needled by a persistent and smarmy reporter asking off-topic questions about his “fugitive mother” and her apparent legal troubles. In no time, he responds to the reporter with a vicious jab to the eye, and finds himself banned from the league.
In the very next scene, he’s meeting with his PR team as they brainstorm ideas for moving him forward now that his playing career is in tatters. Their solution? Placing him as the new coach of South Korea’s national team in the Homeless World Cup. (It is important to note here that the Homeless World Cup is a real event that has been contested since 1998.) Not only will he take over this job, aspiring filmmaker Lee So-min will be embedded with him, producing a documentary film of the experience that will serve as his ticket back to respectability.
It might seem a bit unfamiliar at first glance, both to viewers unfamiliar with the concept of the Homeless World Cup and to non-Korean-speaking viewers who might not know the two leads (both fairly big stars in South Korea). But at its root, it’s a very familiar formula for feel-good sports movies–a gruff, grumpy figure forced to wrestle with his demons, get right, and maybe even smile a bit on his way to becoming a winner. It’s Gordon Bombay in The Mighty Ducks. It’s Coach Norman Dale in Hoosiers. It’s Tom Hanks’ drunkard Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own, or Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis in Bull Durham. It’s a story you’ve seen many times before, and that’s true both for better and for worse–tropes exist because they mostly work.
This all plays out in high-octane fashion; the film bursts with snappy dialogue, high-energy music and energetic cinematography, even if it does start to lag a bit over the film’s slightly-more-than-two-hour runtime. (It could have stood to be a bit shorter.) The film makes some smart gestures toward destigmatizing homelessness, reminding viewers how we’re each only a few bad breaks from ending up in such a scenario. This plays out largely at the surface level, though, and is mostly abandoned in the second half of the film as we get into resolving the on-field drama–honestly, much in the way you’d expect for a sports movie of this ilk.
Dream has some very endearing qualities, but for viewers who don’t speak Korean and aren’t familiar with the leads, it may be hard to find much here that differentiates it from the pack in a genre that’s got no shortage of similarly-structured entries.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Dream is a perfectly nice feel-good sports movie with some winning elements, but there’s not much to distinguish it from other similar entrants in the genre.
Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.