Considering two of my favourite films so far this year have been Chinese efforts, I figured it’d be worth diving into that creative pool once again with this sports biopic about the Chinese women’s volleyball team. And ignoring whatever easy jokes I could make about that particular choice of sport, the film itself presents it in pretty visceral fashion. When their coach says that they need to "shed blood, not tears", he really isn’t kidding, and their physical exertion combined with the sound mixing (that ‘thwack’ as they make contact with the ball is weirdly satisfying) starts the film on solid ground.
From there, the actual competitive games make for gripping material, with the Chinese team going up against Japan and Brazil in two separate matches that (possibly as a result of me not already knowing these results beforehand) manage what every great sports film should strive for and made me invested in the outcome. And as a bonus, the filmmakers’ decision to cast actual Chinese athletes, most of whom are even playing themselves, yields far better results than last time I saw this trick attempted.
However, as good as the surface-level material is, there’s a rather large obstacle in the way of properly getting into it for me. The film follows the Chinese standard in how it functions largely as party propaganda, but that ultimately isn’t much of an issue. Competition on the international level is as much about showing national superiority as it is about physical exertion, and in the context of team sports, the underlying communist ideal of the whole over the individual at least makes sense.
No, where the film stumbles is into one of the more unfortunately common pits a biopic can end up in: Trying to cover too many events in a single sitting. Chronologically, the film covers a span of time from 1979 to just before the present day, but the way it’s done is in two big chunks: The initial showing of dominance during the ‘80s, and the comeback at the 2016 Rio Olympics. It starts out well through literal sportsmanship, but once it establishes the team as a force to be reckoned with, it ends up telling a lot of the story from there until the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Since part of that story involves the Chinese team setting up their winning streak, it wasn’t essential to see all of it, but when it also includes one of the ‘80s’ best players becoming a coach for the US team, it feels more rushed than it should.
That last point is a real issue for me, as said coach Lang Ping (Gong Li, with Lang Ping’s actual daughter Bai Land playing her younger self) is the closest this film gets to having a real character arc. But because it’s so diced up, it’s difficult to get invested in it despite the film trying to give it a much-needed boost. While the traitor implications regarding her stint as the US coach are a bit… yeah, the fact that we don’t even see any of the build-up towards that decision cuts into the drama. Ditto for her relationship with coach Chen Zhonghe (Huang Bo), which the film also presents as something important, even though it ultimately doesn’t do anything substantial for the rest of the plot.
Which is a real shame because, just going by the central sporting scenes, director Peter Chan and company show enough aptitude with the genre to make this seem like a worthwhile endeavour. But because all of the heart and soul behind it is so wonky and lacklustre, I’d almost argue that this would’ve worked a lot better as a straight-forward documentary; they have the bulk of the real players on-hand, after all. I say almost because, with how dire the plot progression is in Zhang Ji’s script, I doubt it would’ve been much better even if they did go that route.
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