Shaolin Soccer

A fun movie! I actually liked it! The Special Effects were also good! If you can get it cheap, do so and have fun watching it! Three stars!

i bought this movie after being blown away by the actor/director's masterpiece, Kung Fu Hustle.

while it contains similar humor elements and near-anime-type action, it's really not worth the buy, and you would be better served by purchasing Kung Fu Hustle which is much funnier and overall a better production. i probably watch Kung Fu Hustle once every couple of months, which is no small complement.

Stephen Chow did an amazing job of creating a story involving real characters in not so real, but agreeable situations. He has given each character a personality of its own; just to create comedy, with a humor that is sometimes honest and others rough. It has some great comedy moments although, coming from the characters, very peculiar ones.

It basically all comes from the characters. You have different persons, united by one thing: Shaolin Kung-Fu. And then you have one man, with one passion: Soccer. This premise helps to create human emotions in the characters. They all have a past that, for some reason, want to forget. Except one of them, who could be living in the past, and still thinks in the goodness of Shaolin Kung-Fu. He believes in it so much, that he gives speeches to people about the qualities of his culture, and the improvement it could do in society. He is right, and sooner or later, she will remind these things to some people, and they will all remember. They will all be prepared to get together again.

What a good-hearted film this is, and how it is filmed, it's beyond imagination. You will find special effects from other world. In occasions, these will seem slow for you, and you will think they are not well managed or handled; but then you will watch. Watching will make you connect all the elements of the story, to make it one. In elements I include special effects, and say again: they couldn't be done better, especially in a movie like this one.

The entire cast did a wonderful job in their roles by giving their characters the personal development they need. They are not playing the most complex people in the world, but they still know what characters they're playing. Some of the scenes, such as the first time we see Mui making bread, are absolute genius; so funny that you can't help but to laugh. I felt Mui seemed like she should have been in more of the film, and I've read that a lot of her part got cut out of the American release, which is a shame. A number of people are saying the original is vastly superior to the edited U.S. version, but this version is so great that I would be mightily impressed if that were true.

The idea of this movie is ingenious, using the style of extravagant martial arts films in a soccer movie, and is done beautifully. You will probably find something you've seen before, I can't deny that. You will find the ending you expect, the situations you imagine, the resolutions you anticipate, or not. You'll have the old coach, the person with the dreams and the heart, the girl; it's just that you'll have them differently (you'll realize what I mean). This is another type of cliché, a very different one, so different that I would say it is not a cliché at all.

By all traditional aspects of how to review a movie, Shaolin Soccer was a bad movie. It has bad acting, a predictable plot, horrendous dialog ... the best thing you could say about it was the the effects were very well done. But it was oh so much fun! Put away your sensibilities and you can sit back and just enjoy the show.

I thought the movie had great action. There also, was a little comedy here and there.