The Royale With Cheese Movie Club: Shaolin Soccer

The Royale With Cheese Movie Club is a personal blog category where I finally watch a film that everybody else in the world has enjoyed. This is what happens when you take 20 years to finally get around to watching Pulp Fiction. And after that, I made a blog category for such movies.

So … twenty-five years after this movie first hit the theaters … and since there’s a World Cup going on right now … I said to myself, “Self, let’s watch a comedy sports movie about soccer.”

Because, hey, who doesn’t love a motion picture about an underdog group of unwanteds who form a team and eventually win the championship in the final few minutes? It’s a movie plot as old as film itself. And it seems like every sport has at least one “let’s get together and win the championship, or die trying” film going for it. Baseball had Major League, football had The Longest Yard. There was Slap Shot for hockey, Hoosiers for basketball – heck, even curling had one of these films (Men With Brooms, which was pretty funny in its own right).

But I never thought I’d see someone integrate Shaolin martial arts and soccer into one film.

And it’s just laugh-out-loud funny. All the classic sports movie tropes integrated with kung fu tropes, all mixed together and thrown on the pitch. And in the middle of the film, there’s a dance scene – and a love story – and training montages – and a ton of silly special effects that allow you to laugh along with the film itself.

But the real fun of Shaolin Soccer is trying to pick up all the comedic and action nods to other films. There’s some Three Stooges-inspired moves in the film; there’s some Buster Keaton / Harold Lloyd pratfalls in some of the scenes; and the goaltender has his Bruce Lee imitation down to the yellow tracksuit and the nose rub. Ha.

Now the version I saw was on the Tubi channel and was subtitled rather than dubbed. Other streaming services may have the American dub to it, but you’re going to want as close a copy to the original as you can (apparently, Harvey Weinstein imported the film to America and edited it like it was an ingenue on a screen test, so avoid that version if you can).

Definitely fun stuff. Sorry I didn’t see this film 25 years ago. 😀