Using their skills, they can show the whole world how Shaolin can be applied to every day life! Unfortunately, the brothers run afoul of Team Evil. This involves assembling his brothers and forming a soccer team. The movie is filled with nonstop silliness in the vein of Buster Keaton: physical gags that bear little trace of meanness or irony.Ĭhow (playing “Mighty Steel Leg”) has a hare-brained plan to bring the secrets of Shaolin to the general public. Tis a silly place, but one that you wish you could live in. Rival soccer clubs are women wearing a mustache disguise. A very large man can float on the winds as if he were a feather. A woman uses her balletic kung fu skills to make the best tasting pastries in the city. (Though one fella does manage to avoid serious injury when his boss smashes things over his head.) Out of place dance scenes will spontaneously break out in the streets. It helps that Chow establishes the world as a very weird one, indeed, where former Shaolin monks are wasting their talents in real world occupations that don’t require their finely honed fighting techniques. This is soccer as if it were played by Dragonball Z characters.
Not where the ball is hit so hard that they catch fire, or the shock of a kick can send seismic ripples down the length of the stadium.
New England Patriots, who? I root for the Revolution, buddy! Rather than getting three whole Pixar movies, NASCAR would be decried as this boring spectator silliness where cars just run around in circles. Soccer would have immediately replaced gridiron football as the number one sport in America. Well… had they seen Shaolin Soccer, they would have immediately changed their minds. Who wants to watch a movie filled with that boring nonsense? I imagine it’s partly because, at the time, soccer was this low-scoring sport inexplicably embraced by everyone else in the world to the point they were getting killed in the stands. While a huge hit in China, the film grossed less than a million dollars on its 2004 theatrical release in the US. Stephen Chow’s directorial output may have since been eclipsed by other movies -– either by the wild Looney Tunes homage of Kung Fu Hustle or China’s 2016 box office champion The Mermaid - but for me the closest to my heart is 2001’s Blue Ribbon Award winner for best Foreign Language Film, Shaolin Soccer.
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