• Shaolin Soccer

Shaolin Soccer

"Sing" has been searching for years for another art with which to combine the skills of Shaolin kung fu, and has finally found it in the game of soccer. He'll need all those kung fu skills, too, when he and his team-mates come face to face in the big game with the aptly-named Evil Team...

Stephen Chow is one of the relatively few big names of Hong Kong film who haven't crossed over to the West, and one of the reasons often given is the cultural differences that make HK humor difficult for western audiences. This film, scheduled for U.S. release in a dubbed & edited version on August 8, could very well be the movie that changes all that. The humor of Shaolin Soccer is rarely as off-the-wall wacky as Chow films like Love On Delivery or Fight Back To School, and the story about a bunch of misfits having to find it within themselves to rise to the occasion and become winners has a comfortably familiar air to U.S. filmgoers. It's also Chow's biggest ever Hong Kong hit, which is a little bit mystifying. Chow's character, Sing, was charged years earlier by his Sifu to find a new format for bringing Shaolin martial arts to the world at large, and when he meets Fung, the former colleague of the Evil Team leader Hung, he's found it. Getting his old martial arts classmates back together turns out to be a rather amusing twist on The Seven Samurai, and he even gets a new recruit in Mui, who demonstrates remarkable Shaolin-like abilities in baking bread, and who comes in very handy in the big campionship. It's nice (for non-soccer fans) that the big championship game doesn't happen until over an hour into the movie, so you don't have an entire movie filled with nothing BUT soccer, and once the game begins, the spotlight is just as much on the incredible, near-mystical powers that Shaolin gives them as on the sport... and rest assured, those powers are spectacular to behold. In keeping with the simplistic nature of sports films, everything is pure black or pure white... not much doubt who you should be booing when the opponent is actually NAMED "The Evil Team"...but that's all part of the unique pleasures of this movie, and there certainly are plenty of pleasures to be had. Fans of Chow's more totally off-the-wall madcap, slapstick silliness might feel that he's reined in just a bit for the sake of a somewhat more conventional, mainstream story is this film, and that probably is true... fans of those films won't find as high a ratio of laughs perminute. But Shaolin Soccer is still a winner, with interesting characters, downright mindboggling special effects, and the unique style that nobody else but Chau has. And if this film really does break him big in the West, those sillier films will become better known, too. So it's all to the good.

Also starring Vicky Zhou, Ng Han Tat and Patrick Tse, with special appearances by Cecilia Cheung and Karen Mok. Directed and co-written by Stephen Chau. (Review written: 5/12/03)

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