A Winning Team

For starters, the acting early on is terrible. A large part of that, but not all, is Nadia Hatta trying to be a stuck up celebrity soccer star. Part of me wondered if the actor just didn't want to play that ugly side of Emily. The soccer scenes in the beginning, which are supposed to be professional soccer, are amateur. The scene with just Emily and the coach is bad too.

As in so many movies of this genre, Emily eventually does a 180 in personality and becomes likeable, although in this movie it took a while. I don't know what the deal was with Kristoffer Polaha, but his hair was worse than any of the acting, especially in his first scene. I try not to complain about personal appearance, but when it looks like it is the makeup crew, I do call it out. In this case it was distracting. I consider him to be one of the more reliable Hallmark actors, but throughout this movie I wasn't really impressed.

Later scenes of high school soccer games are also terrible. Dribble the ball up slowly toward the goalie with no opposition and kick the ball slowly across the line. I guess they didn't have the budget, or probably the set, to do some live action full speed.

The conflict through ending is mostly a predictable copy of so many other of these movies where one of the leads had been taking a break from her regular life through most of the movie.

In general, the polite term for Hallmark films, in my case, was "nice". A Winning Team is ...eccentric. For a very forced romance between outgoing/ carefree trainer, less interested by the victory of team and too ambitious young soccer player , for the unrealistic end and for the brother of soccer player lady who is more indifferent or only emotional woody or Peter Pan syndrome example .

Sure, Kristopher Polaha and Nadia Hatta. A nice couple but, maybe, only on paper.

Because the film , looking for be original, offers strange to biyarre moral lessons .

Indeed, being myself carefree, I see with obvious sympathy Ian . But a Hallmark film, I suppose, offers some examples of ideal people in skin of modern fairy tale.

So, reasonable to eccentric sounds fair to define it.

2 stars for this movie, 1 goes to Kristoffer Polaha who I absolutely love his movies and 1 for the character that plays her niece Ava (Niki Garcia) and 1 for supporting actors. I have to subtract 1 star for the TERRIBLE acting by lead actor Emily Chan (Nadia Hatta) she was so over the top to the point what ever she said or did was not even believable. I sure hope she gets some acting lessons by Hallmark if they want to use her again.

Now regarding the plot, it was ok...sort of but so difficult to enjoy with the lead actor so bad. Not even sure the two were any sort of match for friendship let a lone a romance.

The most common problem with movies or TV series is a poor script and that's the main problem here. It's not an exciting script and even the actors don't find it exciting. It's boring, football/soccer can be exciting even in light shows like Ted Lasso. Nadia Hatta's mopey suspended player act just doesn't do it, miscasting. Kris Polaha is good, but he's better acting in the mystery genre. The rest of the cast is so-so, nothing spectacular.

It's hard to pull off realistic sports plays unless the cinematography and editing are good, this is low budget. Details aren't always Hallmark's forte, of course they might have just purchased this from a production company.

I am a huge Hallmark fan and especially a Kristoffer fan, and as much as I liked the premise of the movie, I had trouble watching because Kristoffer is almost old enough to be Hatta's father. I also never criticize an actor's looks and as handsome as he is, the hair-do they gave him, was horrendous. I believe they thought it made him look younger, but for me, it just didn't work. It just made him look older. It's really too bad because they are both good actors but whoever did the casting for this one, missed the mark. He is much better with Jill in his Mystery 101 series, or someone closer to his age.