Stream K-Dramas at OnDemandKorea

"Mr. Gam's Victory"- An Impressive Work

In the modern era when success is all that matters, a story about one "loser" has moved the hearts of the audience recently. It's the movie "Mr. Gam's Victory - Mr. Gam's Victory", which portrays a real-life professional baseball player. The number one reason this movie has received so much applause is because it tackles the subject of baseball, not politics. "Mr. Gam's Victory" is a heartrending story about a professional pitcher Kam Sa-yong, who was the losing pitcher of the Sammi Superstars, the worst of the six baseball teams of 1982, when baseball was just taking root.

Unlike other Korean blockbusters that mostly focus on Korea 's modern history and big political events and figures, "Mr. Gam's Victory" has been highly credited for tackling the subject of cultural history-not political history -by portraying the everyday life of an unknown baseball player in a heartfelt natural way and perfectly reproducing the background of the 1980s.

The second reason "Mr. Gam's Victory" has stolen the spotlight is the fact that it has picked a dangerous sports genre as its subject. "Mr. Gam's Victory" was a result of a bold endeavor to produce an unprecedented sports movie in 2001, when the biggest hits of the Korean movie industry at the time were comedies about organized crime. Believing that the success of a sports movie depends on technical excellence, the production team of the movie, with 50 percent of all scenes featuring baseball, replaced the entire illumination equipment of Mok-dong Stadium, the set of the movie, with lighting for filming, and installed several cameras on the set to capture the scenes from various angles. Even special cameras were deployed to convey the psychological tension that players were going through. As the final finishing touch in creating the first top-class sports movie in Korea , the production team conducted a series of experiments during film development and editing.

What's interesting is that while "Mr. Gam's Victory" is the first full-fledged Korean movie about sports, it at the same time openly violates the established practices of the sports genre. And the third reason behind this movie's success is its dissention to other sports dramas in which main characters achieve dramatic success after numerous ordeals and adversities.

Despite his arduous efforts, Kam Sa-yong was just a losing player, and the culmination of this movie is not dramatic success but dramatic failure. However, by dampening the audience's expectations upfront, this "loser" movie overwhelms its viewers with deep emotion. "Mr. Gam's Victory" has been highly acclaimed not only for its bold attempt to become a top-notch sports movie, but also for having overcome the limits of a sports drama. In five years of being a baseball player, Kam Sa-yong won only once, but that only victory was way too precious to him. Now, "Mr. Gam's Victory" is expected to bring a long-awaited first victory to Korean sports movies.

Advertisement

❎ Try Ad-free