Think this will be a short review as it followed the same formula as so many other movies back some years ago, seemed between 2001-2007 there were so many of these 'underdog' movies released where the should be losers as far as a person or team goes always comes back to win whatever event they're in. Some others were Ping Pong, Touch, Robokon, H2 and many others, almost all were based on a manga and this movie was no exception except for the fact this wasn't as good as the others mentioned as the storyline was a bit weak and not all that much really happened.
High school diver Ami and swimmer Keisuke don't exactly get along. Their parents run rival sweets shops and Ami is long-time friends, and maybe more, with Keisuke's freestyle rival Hiroki. Over time, however, hostile words give way to hesitant attraction, leaving Ami torn between Keisuke and Hiroki. With the national championship coming up, the young swimmers are competing for more than the title, but also their hearts.... Asianwiki
That mini review above was really all that transpired in this film, mentioned a weak storyline and it was, there were some okay scenes, especially with Masami and Yui but seems as though the formula for these kinds of movies had worn off.
Okay, perhaps a bit more happened such as the relationship between Ami and Keisuke, the reason they didn't get along at first was that she blamed him for the death of his grandfather who was a rival of Keisuke's grandfather as they both ran bakeries and Ami's had died trying to keep up with his rival, competition for sweets was too much for him and to be honest that sounded like it would have been a better movie. Over time though Ami came to her senses and knew that there was no reason to blame Keisuke for anything, she really shouldn't have put any blame on him in the first place. Actually the review above didn't mention where they were living, there was an 'athletic' school where they and many others were residing, all of them were there to train for a sport such as swimming, diving, judo, etc, they were all there on scholarship because they all had the potential to be excellent at their sports, Ami didn;t appear to be real good at diving though.
The real story to this film though was between the two swimmers Keisuke and Hiroki, Keisuke had all the promise in the world but just couldn't get over that hump to beat Hiroki, who was a bit older and the best swimmer perhaps in Japan as during the movie he ended up setting two new records for his swim distance. Well, as par for the course for these kinds of movie it ends up with a final meet and I don't really need to say what happened but if you've seen one of these movies you know, Keisuke ends up nipping Hiriko in their final race in a climatic ending which they stretched out a tad but there really was no excitement in it. And so it ended where the underdog against all odds comes back and somehow tops the #1 person in that sport.
Noticed after this film there was a big slowdown in these kinds of movies, that formula just got too stretched and really wasn't working, didn't work too well for this film. Like I said this was going to be a brief review and it was as really not much happened, few other subplots which never got enough attention and a few other things that could have made this better didn't get fully explained, such as the relationship between Ami and Hiroki.
Hard to give this a recommendation, if you're a fan of the main stars then would say it's worth a watch, if you're not a fan then you won't be missing anything if you pass on it so a final rating for this would be a 6.5/10. However the main reasons to see this are for Masami who in a swimsuit just makes your heart beat that much faster and for Yui, not a big role but many of her scenes were with Masami, one scene that stood out was when the two of them were playing beachball together, that almost makes the film worth watching. Check out the next posts for many screenshots from the film and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Release Date: August 26th, 2006 Running time: 100 minutes Director: Kentaro Otani
Cast:
Masami Nagasawa as Ami Ninomiya
Mokomichi Hayami as Keisuke Yamato
Tsuyoshi Abe as Hiroki Nakanishi
Yui Ichikawa as Kaori Koyanagi
Mai Takahashi as Reiko Kinoshita
Takuya Ishida as Tsuyoshi Ogata
Norito Yashima as Takehito Furuya
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