[HanCinema's Film Review] "Dream - 2020"

With 1,128,375 admissions last year, "Dream - 2020" didn't exactly do badly at the South Korean box office, but its performance wasnt especially impressive either. For the sake of comparison, "Concrete Utopia" also featured Park Seo-joon in a leading role, and earned over three times as many admissions. Park Seo-joon was (sort of) the villain of that postapocalyptic thriller, and is similarly ambiguous here as Hong-dae, an unpleasant professional soccer player who tries to recover from his damaged reputation by coaching South Korea's team for the Homeless World Cup.

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As counterintuitive as this may sound, "Dream - 2020" is a deeply cynical movie. Much of this is due to So-min (played by Lee Ji-eun), the director of the television documentary crew that follows Hong-dae and his homeless team around looking for touching moments to film. So-min also insists that Hong-dae put players onto the team who have no talent for soccer at all just because it will make for better public interest stories.

Some of these homeless people manage to injure themselves over the course of the movie through sheer enthusiasm, motivated as they are by their public interest stories which are real, even if So-min's framing isn't. And this is where "Dream - 2020" is at its most flawed. The Homeless World Cup is real. In fact, it will be running in Seoul next month. As the opening subtitles note, "Dream - 2020" has no relation to any actual performance South Korea has had at the Homeless World Cup.

This is relieving, since "Dream - 2020" gives the impression that none of the characters on the team are receiving tangible help to stop being homeless, and far from being compensated to appear in the documentary, many continue to sell copies of Big Issue in the street. Hong-dae does favors for them every so often to prove he's a good guy. But by and large, "Dream - 2020" is the exact same kind of inspirational story it seems to be trying to parody, where homeless people pull themselves out of poverty, or at least misery, by just working hard.

This problem also applies to the Homeless World Cup at large. The whole premise makes it sound like homeless people are flown in from all over the world to play soccer for the amusement of the rest of us. It doesn't even occur to writer/director Lee Byeon-hee-I to address any of these unfortunate implications because his satirical ire is chiefly used on the field of television documentary production and, to a lesser extent, celebrity news reporting.

In a mostly pointless subplot, Hong-dae's mother is on the run from the law, and his expulsion from professional soccer is prompted in part by his assaulting an obnoxious reporter who keeps asking him about it. At over two hours long, "Dream - 2020" really needed better editing. The climax isn't even interesting- the team can't possibly win, since they barely even know how to play soccer. Everyone's redemption, especially So-min's, feels very unearned, since to what little extent "Dream - 2020" evokes any empathy at all, none of it has anything to do with the Homeless World Cup.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Dream - 2020" is directed by Lee Byeong-heon-I, and features Park Seo-joon, Lee Ji-eun, Kim Jong-soo, Ko Chang-seok, Jung Seung-gil, Lee Hyun-woo. Release date in Korea: 2023/04/26.