For the American release of this film, Miramax trimmed 23 minutes and threatened to change its name to Kung Fu Soccer, but relented on the latter. Most are out of shape or painfully skinny and none of them look like they would last two minutes on a soccer field. Sing reassembles his former shaolin brothers, all of whom are now living in one form of shame and disgrace or another. He's got a wicked sense of parody and satire without the mean spiritedness that seems so prevalent in western comedy. Chow is one of the top comics in Asia and it's easy to understand why. All you have to see is Team Evil to figure out this movie doesn't take itself very seriously. Now Fung is a flunky for Hung, who looks like an Asian Robert Evans and is now the coach of Team Evil, a nasty soccer team that wears all black. Years earlier, he was a teammate with Hung (Yin Tse), but he blew a penalty kick and an irate mob broke his leg. Fung has a bit more motivation than Sing. He meets up with former soccer great "Golden Leg" Fung (his regular sidekick Man Tat Ng), and a brilliant idea is hatched: merge martial arts power and control with the sport of soccer and win a soccer tournament. He lives, it seems, on turning in recyclable materials, all the while espousing the wonders of the martial arts. In it, he plays Sing, a chronic optimist despite looking like a homeless man. Actor/director Stephen Chow manages to channel Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey goofiness and make a done-to-death genre hilarious again with this movie. Parodies of The Matrix are commonplace these days, taking all the fun out of them.
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