SnoopyStyle
"Golden Leg" Fung was a great Hong Kong soccer star. His teammate Hung deliberately threw a game and hired a mob to break Fung's leg. Hung is now a fabulously rich and powerful chairman of the soccer tournament while Fung is a drunken has-been with a limp. Fung encounters street person "Mighty Steel Leg" Sing (Stephen Chow) who thinks Shaolin kung fu is the answer to everything. Sing meets special-powered street baker Mui with severe acne. Sing tries to promote kung fu by singing in a karaoke club with brother Iron Head. Sing refuses to fight a street gang but turns it into a super soccer demonstration. Fung tells Sing to play soccer and Sing sees an opportunity to promote kung fu with the other Shaolin brothers.I love this most for the moments of deadpan humor and its surreal touches. There are a couple of aspects that I find less funny. The first soccer game with the thugs is great but the subsequent games become less and less funny. It's a function of the same action over and over again. The other minor problem is Mui's makeover. She has emotional flip-flops that are too jarring. It's also a great opportunity for her to join the team. I wish the scene starts with the dejected team and an injured goalkeeper. By the end, they come up with an idea for her to train as the new goalkeeper. Her training could be a fun traditional addition. I love the first half and the second half isn't that bad.
Adam Peters
(59%) A very crazy, very childish - but in a good way - effects based comedy. The ideas featured don't always work well (like most comedy), although largely they do, and even the few more subtle comedic elements translate nicely. There's quite a number of strange, and very eastern almost manga style elements that would never make it into a western film such as the really unusual romantic love interest character that comes across as more confusing than anything else. In terms of the actual soccer played it's more likened to an episode of "Wacky races" than the real game itself, but it's still very fun to watch, and fans of Chow will almost certainly like his over-the-top brand of comedy.
johnnyboyz
So here is Shaolin Soccer, a film that exists purely to promote football in foreign countries that don't embrace the sport and make it come across as quite 'cool' when really, it's a bad advert for the game and a quite shocking display of egotistical know-how on the director's behalf. Firstly, it's not 'soccer' – it's football and the reasons for the use of the word 'soccer' boils down to the fact 'soccer' is the more globally recognised word and the fact it goes rather neatly with the word 'Shaolin', creating a cute little slice of alliteration.Let's think back, shall we? What particularly large event was about to happen in the world of football around about the time Shaolin Soccer was released? Ah yes, The FIFA Football World Cup; hosted in, shock(!), the Far East with Japan and South Korea as the joint hosts. Who were making their debut in this prestigious event, good lord; wouldn't you know it – China, the very nation from whence Shaolin Soccer came. Good grief, the film even opened in Japan one day into the World Cup itself. What a shameless and pointless plug Shaolin Soccer is turning out to be, and the film hasn't even started yet."So it's an event film - so what?" I hear you ask. Well, plenty actually. While the actual scenes of football and kung-fu being entwined and meshed together in this CGI fuelled orgy of creative movement and balance are reasonably 'fun' to watch, I take no real pleasure in laying into the rest of the film which is a pretty ordinary exercise in old fashioned romance; the underdog working his way up and down and out individuals recognising their 'wrong belief' (or 'goal' seeing as it's football) before turning their life around and winning through. All fine and dandy but it doesn't nourish much in the long run.Stephen Chow is one of the more accessible filmmakers from the Far East, in fact, with hindsight he's probably the most accessible since a certain John Woo. Chow brings his own flair and style to the above ideas but it is style and only style that he brings, placing his characters in a grounded world of 'down-and-outs' as they trudge from street to street collecting garbage and taking swigs from beer cans but everything is counter balanced by random outbursts of song, dance and scenes during which characters kick objects into space and back down again.What I don't like is Stephen Chow casting himself as this great visionary; an all powerful character that has all the answers and, eventually, becomes the saviour of his team through great warrior-like abilities. Chow isn't prepared to lave a laugh at himself when it comes to directing and acting ,much like Kevin Smith does when he casts himself as a mute thus identifying the limited time/say directors should have in-front of the camera rather than behind it. Another example is Tarantino, who casts himself as a fall guy or someone who eventually gets killed – a 'nearly-almost' role that supports rather than leads.Here, Chow is some kind of master. He, and he identifies this himself in the film, comes across the ingenious notion to combine football with martial arts; something that no man in the history of Shaolin or otherwise has ever thought of. It is his goal to bring Shaolin kung-fu to the forefront of the rest of the world. Chow casts himself as this visionary; perhaps a misunderstood genius and it just falls flat. But it seems the film is immune from criticism, because it's 'supposed to be bad'. True, the film is shot in a stylised and deliberately cheesy manner with crash zooms and dodgy special effects that, I presume, are supposed to look really bad but maybe were a budget constraint that coincidentally fell in their favour, you never know. But the referencing and deliberate daftness is something that only really stays fresh for a certain amount of time.At its very centre, Shaolin Soccer is supposed to be about the respect shown towards ancient beliefs and the consequent modernisation of these beliefs as we move into the 21st Century. In this case, combining the relatively modern practise of football with age-old techniques as demonstrated with Shaolin martial arts. Stephen Chow plays Sing whose nickname and consequent 'power' is his mighty steel leg that can kick large dumpsters up into the air and onto piles of others. After a bit of banter with Fung (Man Tat Ng), who used to have a golden leg, he gets together a bits and bobs team made up of his brothers, all of whom are down and out themselves but retain a forgotten kung-fu power deep with their minds.The team are predictably useless at first but suffer epiphanies in due course and it isn't long before they're in a China based tournament with other teams. Their first match is a 60odd-nil thrashing of the "number one ranked team" – I guess they must've miraculously seen off Team Evil and the team made up of girls sporting moustaches in the previous season or something. Ah yes, 'Team Evil' the group of players run by Hung (Yin Tse) who is responsible for Fung's past tragedy in life when he payed him off for throwing a match and then broke his leg, or something. Team Evil are, quite understandably, evil and they wear a pitch black kit. Also, they train underwater – when they kick a ball, a miniature H-bomb explosion goes off readying the audience for whatever explosive results might happen later on in a match. But, there are no explosive results to speak of, just a grudge match between two teams led by Chow on his ego trip and an off the field rivalry that goes way back. It's all very forgettable and I was thankful that it ended, when it ended.
