The marathon, the pinnacle of athletic achievement, that most glorious sporting edifice to the strength, tenacity and persistence of mankind, of all popular sports, it is viewed as the grandest testament of endurance and it is only fitting that, following in its subject’s footsteps, Pacemaker should proudly take on that mantle by becoming the year-to-date’s greatest cinematic endurance test.
Sports movies are rarely too fixated on the physical activities they depict, they are merely gateways into their characters, sometimes they can be metaphors and they always hope to add some entertainment value. Korean cinema is particularly astute in its appropriation of generic tropes and it should come as no surprise that the sports film has become prevalent in the local industry. Rather than exploit a sport for it aesthetic or escapist potential however, Korean hitmakers have long seized on their melodramatic potential. So thoroughly has this line been pursued that any sport is fair game, local popularity doesn’t really factor into it. The results speak for themselves: how else could the country’s most successful sports movie be about South Korea’s ski-jumping team (Take Off, 2008)?
