Published via Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

Football a.k.a. soccer is the most popular sport in the world, but its popularity failed to reflect itself to world cinema. This could be partly explain by difficulties in depicting Beautiful Game in dramatic way and partly because football lacks popularity in United States, the country with the most powerful and the most influential cinema industry. Somewhat unsurprisingly, one of the most successful football films of all times was produced outside Hollywood. It was Shaolin Soccer, 2001 Hong Kong sports comedy directed by Stephen Chow.

Stephen Chow appears in the main role of Sing, young man who used to be monk in famous Buddhist monastery of Shaolin and who wants to promote kung fu and other skills learned there among ordinary people. He didn’t have much success in it, so he is forced to work menial jobs for living. “Golden Leg” Fung (played by Ng Man-tat) is former Hong Kong football soccer who, after injury, had also to work menial jobs. While seeing Sing to applying some of his impressive skills to ordinary tasks, he gets an idea to form football team made of former Shaolin monks. After some hesitation Sing agrees with Fung and starts football team made of his former brothers and they start compete in prestigious tournament. Thanks to their training in Shaolin skills, they defeat all the competition and advance to finals where they would have to face the most difficult opponent in the form of team led by Hung (played by Patrick Tse), Fung’s old rival. Hung has its own secret weapon that would use against Shaolin team – players that have taken drug that gives almost superhuman abilities.

Stephen Chow is one of the most popular figures of Hong Kong cinema, but, apart from brief relatively moment in first decade of 21st Century, he never achieved global fame in the rank of Jackie Chan, Jet Li or Chow Yun-fat. That might be explained with very specific standards of his humour that often go lower than those in MTV shows. In case of Shaolin Soccer lack of sophistication doesn’t hurt the film. Thanks to frenetic tempo and energetic direction, viewers wouldn’t have time nor inclination to ponder on the issues of taste or particular scenes being realistic. What they could notice on screen would be quite impressive – kung fu skills of the cast are well matched with CGI effects and football fans are going to be quite impressive with the surreal version of its favourite game. Film could have been even better without obligatory romantic subplot featuring Zhao Wei a.k.a. Vicki Zhao, beautiful Chinese actress playing character with grotesque acne on her face. On the other hand, viewers are more likely to be pleased with the film at the end, and this is more than can be said for the most football-related films.

RATING: 6/10 (++)