Seven years on from New King of Comedy, Stephen Chow returns with another reimagining of a past hit in Kung Fu Soccer (功夫女足, gōngfu nǚzú), a new take on the 2001 global sensation Shaolin Soccer. Throughout the ‘90s, Chow had been one of Hong Kong cinema’s most bankable talents with a series of mo lei tau or “nonsense” comedies. There’s no getting away from the fact that the Cantonese language is intrinsic to the genre which heavily relies on zany puns and wordplay in addition to slapstick humour, though the later phase of Chow’s career has largely been in Mainland-friendly Mandarin as is Kung Fu Soccer.
As such, the film struggles to achieve the kind of comedic rhythm that made Chow’s earlier work so popular while its nonsense gags such as a man burning his leg in order to get rid of unwanted hair after mistakenly thinking someone talking on the phone about cooking pork was talking to him play out less successfully. As in Shaolin Soccer, Chow turns subpar CGI into a kitsch feature, leaning in to the unreality of virtual stadia and the uncanniness of a CGI ball being knocked around the pitch to create a cartoon world where the normal rules of physics do not apply.
This time around, the action follows the Emei women’s football team who face ageism and sexism after making a belated bid to win an Asian championship. Headstrong captain Shuang (Zhang Xiaofei) and her childhood friend Jade (Dilraba Dilmurat) are struggling to overcome a falling-out over Jade’s decision to leave the sport and get married only to return following her divorce, while Shuang has dedicated her life to football and kung fu but now at almost 40 is beginning to realise that she may have missed out on other life experiences and has no plans for the future. Shuang is an orphan who found a place within the team and fears abandonment, whereas Jade is a wealthy heiress whose devil-may-care attitude is informed by her financial security.
As expected, part of the path for the team’s success is getting the pair to patch things up, which they eventually do after a little manipulation by “Grand Uncle” Xu Feng (Lay Zhang), another childhood friend with a longstanding crush on Shuang she in fact returns but is unable to act on due to being arrested emotionally having done nothing but sport and kung fu since she was a child. The conclusion that Shuang is gradually guided towards is that she’s too intense and has lost her love of playing the game. She has a lack of empathy for her teammates and an autocratic management style that alienates those around her, a criticism that has been levelled at Chow himself in the past. It’s this internalised pressure that makes it difficult for the players to perform. If they chilled out a bit and rediscovered the joy of it, they might be better placed to face their opponents who also have their own particular quirks.
The film has also come in for criticism for the ways that it depicts the other Asian nations in the competition, most particularly the South Koreans who are shown to be obsessed with beauty and play in underhanded ways while the Korean spoken in the film is delivered unconvincingly. The team from India similarly have some kind of super-stretchy ability and the Australians are defined by aggression and tactlessness. The Japanese team, coached by Takeru Satoh in a cameo appearance, are mainly just violent while the decision to make their goalie a figure of fun for not being considered conventionally attractive seems very outdated and undercuts the film’s other messages of female power and solidarity. The Emei team face questions of ageism and are forced to constantly prove themselves, but eventually come out on top after learning to trust each other, pool their respective strengths, and just have fun playing the game. Backed by Carina Lau’s mahjong-obsessed grandmaster, they have perhaps learned to integrate their martial arts abilities and love of sport to overcome not only the prejudice held against them, but their own internalised anxieties.
Kung Fu Soccer is in North American, UK, & Ireland cinemas from 23rd October.
Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)
