Say cheese, please: Shaolin Soccer is a wacko combination of martial arts and special effects.
This bizarre comedy, which was featured at the Toronto filmfest two years ago, is Hong Kong's most successful production ever. Shaolin Soccer has won most of the available prizes at the Hong Kong film awards.
The story begins with a blast from the past -- footage of a 1981 soccer game and its aftermath. The story picks up in the present day, but the former star soccer player, Golden Leg (Ng Man-Tat), is now a middle-aged man with a ruined limb.
Golden Leg, still a soccer fanatic, encounters a semi-lunatic garbage collector named Sing (filmmaker/choreographer Stephen Chow) who believes that Shaolin philosophy and martial-arts moves can save the world. No, really -- there's even a kung fu move that will park your car for you.
Together, the two men hit upon a scheme that combines their two passions, soccer and Shaolin, and they go out to find Sing's former Shaolin monastery mates to recruit them for a new soccer team.
The former Shaolin brothers have all become lazy and lumpy with the passage of time, but each eventually rediscovers the Shaolin energy and begins to train for soccer. To be the big winners, the Shaolin soccer team will have to go up against the players on Team Evil. As underdog stories go, this one is weirder than most, but you can probably guess the rest.
Much of the appeal of Shaolin Soccer is in the movie's wildly silly visuals, which involve flying soccer players and soccer balls kicked so hard they knock down brick walls. The computer-generated stuff is ridiculous, but that's half the joke.
The Shaolin players include the old, the strange, the fat and the chain-smoking, none of which interferes with their amazing martial-arts skills.
It's bizarre, and it's often very funny. And there are, in the midst of all this, a Hollywood-style dance number and a romance with a sticky-bun maker whose beauty involves facial boils and fleas.
Between the faster-than-the-speed-of-light soccer balls, the nods to Bruce Lee (and perhaps the Three Stooges?), the dodgy script and the general hysteria, Shaolin Soccer doesn't really make much sense, but that's okay. This is just a good-hearted comedy that clearly illustrates why Stephen Chow is so revered.
(This film is rated PG)
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