A Winning Team

An over-aggressive soccer star is suspended and returns home, where she ends up assisting to coach her niece's team and conflicts with its somewhat hapless male coach. Kristoffer Polaha, usually great at portraying benevolent, a bit ironic, down-to-earth characters, appears excessively dejected and subdued in this role. Nadia Hatta is very convincing as unduly competitive, but shows no depth and fails to credibly project shades of a more complete or loving personality.

Somehow, the movie does not explain how these two characters, locked in their own antagonistic bubbles, find some chemistry and a way to love each other.

The idea of the story was nice and contained many elements of human and family values. The execution is bland and generic, which denies giving credit to the intent.

The soccer playing scenes, by the way, are very poorly done and only prove that all actresses, both young and adult, actually suck at this game. It could have been easy to hire a couple of real players to kick the ball once or twice.

Essentially the film is family-friendly, in no way offensive, and watchable. Yet, is no more than a feeble effort that falls quite short of its potential and the target.

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.

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.

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.

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.