Cheer Up is the sweetly told story of an unsuccessful cheerleading
team from a remote Arctic Circle town in Finland over several years as they
experience highs and lows on and off the floor and try never to give up. It mainly focuses on a trio of interesting and
contrasting characters – coach Miia, and teenage team members Patu and Aino.
Cheer Up offers an interesting portrait of loneliness and
sadness mixed with hope and determination and does not go for any hokey Hollywood
story or clinical neatness. Instead it is gentle, affectionate and heartfelt,
capturing small significant personal cares that maybe don’t fit to the overall
story of the team, but which are personal and feel very natural and real. There
are moments of genuine sadness, particularly in Patu’s story as she deals with
grief and family challenges, and also episodes of wonderfully blunt humour,
most memorably with Miia’s dating adventures.
But as genuinely nice and enjoyable as the film is, and despite
brimming with some proper characters – especially irrepressible Miia – the film
doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it is because of a slight lack of
structure and focus, we drift in and out of the team and it feels a bit more
like three vaguely connected story rather than three parts of the whole. The three individual stories could have been
lost in a tighter or neater story, and it is definitely an upside that they
weren’t. The film will leave you with a smile on your face, but perhaps not
quite deliver the emotional punch or impact that is had the potential to do.
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