Victory
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⭐ 7.5 MDL
🔞 PG-13
🎬 Film Overview
CHEERLEADING UNDERDOG PICK
Geoje, 1999. Chu Pil-sun and Jang Mi-na live for one thing: the after-school hip-hop sessions that are the only proof their small shipbuilding town has anything going on. There’s no dance room to claim as their own, so they rehearse in stairwells and empty gyms, wherever nobody chases them off. Then Kim Se-hyeon transfers in from Seoul with an actual cheerleading résumé, and the three of them strike a deal with the school: form a squad, get a room. What starts as a scheme for square footage turns into the Millennium Girls — and an assignment nobody asked for, cheering on a soccer team that hasn’t won anything in years.
Victory doesn’t pretend the stakes are small. Underneath the pom-poms and pep routines sits a real portrait of a working-class port town on the edge of a new millennium, anchored by Pil-sun’s father and the labor dispute quietly eating away at his shipyard job. The film keeps its tone buoyant — needle drops, big dance numbers, teenage bravado — while never fully letting go of what it costs to actually want something in a place like Geoje.
⚡ Quick Verdict
One box. Everything you need to decide.
· MDL · 1,630 ratings
▶ Official Trailer
🎭 Cast & Characters
A scrappy ensemble that turns a means-to-an-end cheer squad into the film’s real heart.
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🍿 Where to Watch
Watch Victory on these platforms.
📖 The Story
No spoilers — just enough to know if this is your film.
Pil-sun and Mi-na have spent most of high school treating hip-hop like a second language — one they practice constantly and have nowhere official to speak. Geoje Commercial High doesn’t have a dance room, doesn’t plan to build one, and doesn’t see the two of them as anything but a scheduling headache. So they make do: empty classrooms after last period, the gym when nobody’s booked it, whatever square footage they can borrow before a teacher notices.
The workaround only holds for so long. Every semester brings a new excuse for why the school can’t spare a room for two girls and a speaker, and the frustration starts curdling into something closer to resignation — until a transfer student changes the math entirely.
Kim Se-hyeon arrives from Seoul carrying an actual cheerleading background, and Pil-sun clocks the opportunity immediately: schools fund clubs, clubs get rooms. The three of them file the paperwork for a cheerleading squad under the name Millennium Girls, treating the whole thing as a means to a very specific end — four walls and a mirror.
The school says yes, with a catch nobody negotiated for. Geoje Commercial’s soccer team has been dead last for as long as anyone can remember, and the Millennium Girls are informed their new job is morale — cheering a group of strangers toward a win streak that has never once existed.
It’s an absurd assignment the film treats completely seriously. Chi-hyung, the team’s earnest, perpetually flustered goalkeeper, becomes an unlikely focal point — there’s history between him and Pil-sun that neither of them says out loud — while the rest of the Millennium Girls, each recruited more by accident than ambition, start finding their own reasons to stay past the point the deal was ever about a room.
Running underneath the cheer plot is Pil-sun’s father, a shipyard worker caught in a labor dispute the film never turns into background noise. Geoje in 1999 is a company town first, and the adults’ fight for basic dignity on the docks sits in direct conversation with the girls’ fight to be taken seriously on the sideline.
Victory keeps its late-90s setting doing real work — needle drops, hip-hop that hasn’t gone mainstream yet, a millennium turning over with all the anxious hope that implies. It’s a coming-of-age underdog story first, but it’s specific about where it’s set and who it’s about: a shipbuilding town far from Seoul, and the kids who decide their small ambitions are worth fighting for anyway.
🏁 Ending Explained
Full spoilers ahead — what happens, what it means, and what it all adds up to.
Full Spoilers Ahead — This section covers the complete ending of Victory. Stop here if you haven’t watched.
What actually happens The Millennium Girls get their moment in the match that matters most — a routine sharp enough to pull the crowd out of its seats and, more importantly, pull Geoje Commercial’s players out of their slump. It’s not subtle: the girls cheer, the energy in the stadium visibly shifts, and the team that has lost every meaningful game for years finally doesn’t. The literal question the film asks — can this team win? — gets answered on the field, in real time, with everyone watching.
What matters more than the scoreline is what happens in the stands once it’s clear the run is real. The win stops being about one match and starts functioning as proof — for the players, for the girls, for a town that hasn’t had much to celebrate — that Geoje isn’t as stuck as it feels.
What each of them actually walks away with Pil-sun and Mi-na started this whole thing chasing a dance room, and the ending doesn’t pretend that goal disappeared — it reframes it. Cheerleading was never the compromise they thought it was; it’s the thing that taught them their energy means more pointed at other people than kept for themselves. Se-hyeon’s arc closes the loop from the other direction: the Seoul transfer who spent the whole film slightly apart from Geoje finally has a place she chose, not one she was assigned to.
The film is deliberately loose about what happens next. Nobody gets a scholarship montage or a confirmed pro career. Whether the Millennium Girls keep cheering past graduation, whether Pil-sun ever dances professionally — Victory leaves it open, more interested in the bond that got built than in mapping out where it goes from here.
The KDW verdict Read the ending as the film’s clearest argument: victory was never really about the scoreboard. It’s the stairwell practices, the borrowed gym time, and the unglamorous work of getting a town’s worst team to believe in itself again — all of it adding up to something bigger than any single win. The final image isn’t a trophy. It’s a crowd on its feet, and that’s the point.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Our honest read on why this film is worth your time — and who it’s for.
Park Bum-soo
Known for: Park Bum-soo wrote and directed the romantic comedy Single in Seoul (2023) and the newsroom drama Red Carpet (2014) — Victory keeps his interest in ensemble-driven, big-hearted stories, trading office cynicism for teenage sincerity and a decade-old soundtrack.
There’s a scene about halfway through where the Millennium Girls run their routine in an empty gym for the first time as an actual team, not four strangers with a shared excuse — and Lee Hye-ri sells the shift with almost nothing, just a half-second where Pil-sun stops performing and starts actually enjoying herself. It’s the same trick Twenty-Five Twenty-One pulled off so well: let a sports hobby carry the emotional plot instead of announcing it.
Victory is squarely in the tradition of Korean underdog-team cinema — it owes an obvious debt to Dream, another film about a hopeless squad finding its footing through people who had no business coaching or cheering them in the first place. Where Victory earns its own space is the Geoje setting; the shipyard backdrop keeps the movie honest about why winning matters so much to a town that doesn’t get many of them.
It’s not a film chasing subtlety, and it doesn’t need to be. Victory knows exactly what kind of crowd-pleaser it wants to be, hits its beats on schedule, and trusts a good needle drop to do the emotional labor a lesser script would spell out.
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