by
Very cheesy, overly sentimental, poorly dubbed, packed with blatant and shoddy CGI, very, very stupid and utterly brilliant. Forget Escape to Victory, the finest football movie of all time has finally arrived.
The almost translucently thin plot follows the story of a bunch of over-the-hill losers, who also happen to be masters of the martial arts of Shaolin kung fu. Reunited and galvanised by a crippled former football hero, “Golden Foot” Fung, the misfits harness their neglected abilities to make football a contact sport full of Matrix-style wirework and time-slice bullet-time photography, and Looney Tunes-style bloodless, knockabout violence. Yes, they got game, and it’s the Beautiful Game of Death.
Aided by the shy and unattractive Mui, who squanders her martial artistry on steamed bread rolls, the only thing standing in the way of their success in the National Soccer Finals is the duplicitous Team Evil, and their scenery-chewing Bond villain of a coach, Hung.
Director, writer, editor, producer and star Stephen Chow is the auteur behind Shaolin Soccer and one of Hong Kong’s leading proponents of "mo lei tau", which is loosely translated as “nonsense comedy”, a relentless stream of toilet gags, slapstick and shameless spoofery. Think the Farrelly Brothers on amphetamines. The jokes spray randomly and relentlessly, hitting as often as they miss, satirising everything from Jurassic Park to John Woo, and if you don’t like one joke, don’t worry, there’ll be another one along in a second that scores a comedy goal.
Whilst most contemporary comedies struggle to raise a smile, let alone a laugh, Chow’s infectious enthusiasm and breezy tone infuse the entire fabric of the film, making it easy to ignore the over-reliance on ropey special effects and inexplicable plotting, and allows you to surrender to the barrage of jokes. Shaolin Soccer is one of those rare instances where “dumbing down” isn’t such a bad thing.
But let’s not sell the action sequences short: Comedian Chow underwent extensive training in order to be able to do his own stunts in the gravity-defying sequences that pepper the film like buckshot, adding a dash of verisimilitude to the otherwise absurd and outlandish action on the pitch.
One final caveat: Be aware that the version of the film being released in the UK is the American Miramax dubbed cut, which is about 20 minutes shorter than the original Chinese cut, resulting in some dodgy scene transitions and, that most heinous of musical crimes, an awful updated version of the Carl Douglas disco-cack kitsch classic Kung-Fu Fighting playing over the closing moments of the film. But don’t let that spoil it for you.
