Kim Yong-wan's Champion is an incredibly endearing sports movie with a revoltingly slimy character just off center. Clearly, I'm not talking about the film's hero (Ma Dong-seok), a down-on-his-luck armwrestler who's returned to Korea from the U.S. where he'd been working as a depressed nightclub bouncer. Nor am I referring to his armwrestling sponsor (Yang Hyun-min), an extortionist, mini-mafioso, big time gambler, and all-around bully. No. I mean the protagonist's spiffily-dressed BFF (Kwon Yul), a slick con artist with big dreams that bank on his buddy's full cooperation in questionable endeavors. This plot devise — he's hard to accept as a human being — is so transparent in his shady behavior that you may wonder if the hero has a screw loose or has a debt of incalculable magnitude.
Such payments aside, I was much more interested about our main guy's relationship to his newly found half-sister (Han Yeri) and her adorable kids (Choi Seung-hoon, Ok Ye-rin). In fact, I'd argue that there's a better version of this script in which the oily sidekick doesn't exist at all. Isn't an expat returning to his homeland to find a new family and long-deffered success against the odds enough for us viewers? We don't need to lose the thugs, the corrupt system, the adoption, the wins and losses, the party-crashing, the family bonding, the underdog story, the acupuncture scene, the ex-con rival (Lee Kyu-ho), the inevitably upbeat end. I love underdog stories. But I hate the middleman. Let's drop the middleman! Isn't that always a good policy?
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