A Winning Team

It has flaws, sure. But given Hallmark's trend as of late I expected to kinda hate it. But I don't. And I'm not shy about criticizing Hallmark these days so that says something.

His hair wasn't that bad despite the comments. It had good and bad moments but overall it worked for this character. The pacing, structure, and some acting were clunky at times but they've had much worse.

I actually liked the premise which shockingly they managed to balance. Neither lead had to be excessively torn down for the other to shine. They actually had two characters with strengths and weaknesses to highlight and overcome respectively. Actual character arcs for both.

I liked it, guys. And for not liking much out of Hallmark these days, I'll take it.

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.

Obviously I expect pro sports players to be competitive, but it's just too much of it here. Whilst this makes for a different storyline in some ways, which is great, I just didn't enjoy the lead's perspective or behaviour to watch this movie much. The male lead is much more relatable - enjoyment and community is what matters, not the win. As with many of these movies, I'm not entirely convinced by the actor / character ages, these show producers really need to write more movies for 40+ now the actors are older. On the upside, this is a cross-generation movie going from teens to grandparent age.

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.

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.