Twenty five years after scoring a resounding critical and commercial hit with the martial arts sports comedy Shaolin Soccer, Hong Kong comedy legend Stephen Chow unleashes an absolute howler of a sequel that fails to replicate anything that made its predecessor a success. The most notable difference between the two films is deliberately obscured by its English title, as Kung Fu Soccer - or "Kung Fu Women’s Football" in Chinese - pivots away from Fung and his colourful collection of dextrous dribbling heroes to focus on a new team of female football players. Much as Ted Lasso has chosen to champion the women’s game in its latest season, so too does Chow here, but the results warrant an immediate VAR ruling.
Nominally set in Hong Kong, thanks to a handful of instantly recognisable locations, Kung Fu Soccer follows in the footsteps of all Chow’s recent offerings by focusing its attentions squarely on a mainland China audience, with every character speaking almost exclusively in Mandarin throughout. The plot follows the changing fortunes of a team of mismatched underdogs as they compete in the “Supremes and Invincibles Cup”, hosted at Kowloon’s brand new Kai Tak Stadium, and catering exclusively to squads of enhanced female players hailing from the four corners of the globe.
Led by their headstrong yet over-the-hill captain and coach Shuang (Zhang Xiaofei), this rag-tag bunch of has-beens and never-will-bes must overcome limited funding, poor training facilities, a duplicitous manager, and persistent in-fighting even before considering anything as pressing as squad selections or on-field tactics.
But this quickly becomes the most glaring problem with Chow’s haphazardly assembled caper: nobody, whether on the field or behind the camera, appears to understand the first thing about football. Audiences coming to Kung Fu Soccer without any prior exposure to the sport might be forgiven for surmising that football matches were won not by the team who scores the most goals, but rather by the team with the most players still standing when the final whistle is blown.
It should be acknowledged that 2001’s Shaolin Soccer doesn’t exactly display FIFA or Championship Manager levels of tactical nuance either when it comes to dramatizing the beautiful game, but Chow’s erstwhile squad of prancing lovelies would have you believe that hacking your opponents to bloody ribbons before booting the ball as hard as possible towards the opposition’s goal was all that was required.
In both films, the teams elevate their gameplay by employing their notable dexterity and discipline in martial arts, but even here, Kung Fu Soccer fails to hit the target. Chow’s reliance on sub-par CGI and AI generated effects throughout the film smear the entire enterprise in an ugly sheen of weightless slop.
Players pirouette through the air, screaming like banshees, as though possessed by escaped Dragonball characters, before conjuring giant animals or weapons out of nowhere that not only sit uncomfortably within the context of a movie about a football tournament, but also look absolutely dreadful. Arriving so soon after the bruising, brawny exertions of a film like Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, the lack of kinetic heft in Chow’s kung fu becomes embarrassingly apparent.
One might be willing to overlook these failings - although in a film called Kung Fu Soccer, I am not entirely sure why - if the final product scored as a rib-tickling comedy, or elevated and celebrated its female protagonists. Alas, any attempt at humour flies wide of the goalposts just as consistently as the action. That is not to say that the jokes are too base or in poor taste, simply that the screenplay, credited to a troublingly large number of writers, offers nothing more sophisticated that characters screaming and flailing at one another.
The central drama - if we are to be generous for a moment - revolves around Shuang, an orphan who has dedicated her life to martial arts (under the tutelage of Carina Lau’s grandmaster) and football. As her 40th birthday looms, she is starting to question her choices - not least that she has refused to act on her feelings towards Xu Feng (Zhang Yixing). She is also resentful of Jade (Dilraba Dilmurat), the rich kid who befriended her at a young age, only to abandon her to go and get married a decade ago. Now that Jade’s marriage has failed, she has rejoined the team, but Shuang’s simmering resentment remains.
Both actresses commit themselves admirably to the material, but there is precious little on the page to work with, while the rest of the squad are reduced to interchangeable one-note archetypes, like “the fat one”, “the shy one” or “the blind one”. The same degree of laziness is levied at their opponents, who are saddled with some pretty excruciating cultural stereotypes, from the pretty yet duplicitous Korean team, to the crass and overly physical Australians, dextrous Indian yogis and the unnecessarily violent villains of the piece, hailing from, where else, but Japan.
The film has even managed to court controversy in some quarters, with its depiction of the Koreans upsetting critics on the Han peninsula, but that might be giving the creators a little too much credit. There are also cameo appearances littered throughout, from the likes of Jimmy O. Yang, Takeru Satoh and Japanese dance troupe Avantgardey, but nobody can get a clear shot off amidst this cavalcade of vacuous dross.
On home soil in mainland China (this really shouldn’t be considered a Hong Kong movie in any capacity) Kung Fu Soccer has done extraordinarily well, earning over US$300 million in its first month of release. But box office figures have rarely been an accurate barometer of cinematic quality, and in this case speaks more to the inevitable result of a high-profile new release playing in excess of 200,000 times a day.
The film ends with a desperate tease, suggesting that Fung and his teammates might fancy their chances against the Emei women, and Kung Fu Soccer’s indisputable financial tally will almost certainly fast-track a sequel of some description into production. Whether that means Shuang and Fung will square off at some point in the future remains to be seen, but on the basis of this tawdry performance, everyone involved deserves to be shown a straight red card and sent for an early shower.