Review: Shaolin Soccer

Fung (Ng Mang Tat) is a former soccer star whose career ended unhappily. Now more than 20 years later he sees a chance to seek revenge on the man who wronged him (Patrick Tse) a smug celebrity coach of a soccer team named Team Evil. Fung’s plan? Hire Shaolin martial artist Sing (Stephen Chow) and create a team that bases their soccer play around their Kung Fu prowess!

 

I enjoyed director-star Stephen Chow’s spectacularly silly but stylish “Kung Fu Hustle” quite a bit, and although I passionately loathe soccer, I figured if anyone could make something entertaining out of the so-called sport, it might just be Chow. Nope, he can’t. This 2001 film makes a big mistake in being primarily a slapstick sports comedy that fails to do anything interesting or exciting with the central concept of a soccer team trained off of kung fu. Instead of something like “Eight Diagram Pole Fighter”, it’s closer to “Space Jam”. And “Space Jam” sucked. This is better, but not enough to be considered a good film.

 

The concept is cute, but boy is it all over the shop in execution, very sloppily made. The screenplay in particular is borderline incoherent at times, as written by Chow and co-writer Kan-Cheung Tsang (who co-wrote “Kung Fu Hustle”, which had coherency issues of its own). There are fun moments such as the hilariously OTT opening credits, and what can only be described as a super kung-fu Pele kick that has to be seen to be believed. The Bruce Lee/spaghetti western-inspired showdown towards the end between Chow and a seemingly impenetrable goalie is cute too. I loved that the goalie on Chow’s team was dressed exactly like Bruce Lee.

 

But a lot of this is just too silly, including Chow’s irritating performance. It’s nice that his character is more endearing than in “Kung Fu Hustle” and the female character is written better, but if you find Jackie Chan’s mugging too much, this film will make you gag non-stop. A whole team of soccer players who Bend it Like Beckham might’ve seemed like a good idea, but as executed here, a little goes...practically nowhere at all.

 

It’s probably someone’s idea of fun, but this is basically a live-action cartoon- a poor one, dull and stupid. Stephen Chow is talented, but I’m not entirely certain he is a good director, and his vision is just too weird, slapsticky, and erratic for me. Sorry, but this one wasn’t of much interest to me outside of Chow wanting to improve life through the teachings of Kung-fu, which is a lovely message. It was a ginormous hit in its native Hong Kong, so there you go.

 

Did I mention that I hate soccer passionately? Yes, soccer. Deal with it. Soccer is a code of football, not football itself. Yes, it’s the one code that uses feet almost exclusively. So?

 

Rating: C