Red Card
Talk about the mighty falling.
Kung Fu Soccer
Director: Stephen Chow • Writers: Stephen Chow, Hunny Ho
Starring: Zhang Xiaofei, Dilraba Dilmurat, Lay Zhang, Carina Lau, Takeru Satoh, Ai Mi
China / Hong Kong • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong August 13 • IIA
Grade: D+
Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s Kung Fu Soccer | 功夫女足 is unfunny, outdated and a desperate grab for relevance for an actor-director past his prime, but more than anything it’s a disappointment. Sure, Chow’s brand of mo lei tau comedy was a thing in Hong Kong and among Hong Kong movie nuts for ages in the 1980s and 1990s, peaking in the early-2000s when Chow broke out worldwide with Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. And true, those are stone classics of their kind, but times and tastes change and Chow ran off to make films in the mainland almost exclusively since about 2008 and rode the emerging Internet culture wave he had a hand in creating there. Props, dude. Get paid.
But judging from the mess that is Kung Fu Soccer, Chow is trapped in amber, and either unable or unwilling to come into 2026 with the rest of us. It may be a matter of unwilling considering the majority of his output since his move north has been reboots and “spiritual” sequels” to past successes: The New King of Comedy and a jazzed up Monkey King movie spring to mind. The fact that Kung Fu Soccer has been a box office hit that’s collected US$320 million-plus since its July release (thank you, World Cup) is baffling to the fullest, and can only be explained by maybe there being literally nothing else to see. Nada. Rien. Because the retrograde jokes, bad CGI and terrible football action (!) on display here do nothing to suggest the “spirit” of either Hustle or Shaolin is hovering nearby. This is a monumental waste of time.
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Shuangshuang (Zhang Xiaofei, YOLO, Malice) is the garbage captain of the Chinese Emei women’s football team, and winning the upcoming Invincible and Grandiose Cup, or some shit, pan-Asian football tournament is the only thing that seems to motivate her to live. It’s super important because reasons. On the team is her childhood bestie, the orphaned Yu Long (Uygur actor Dilraba Dilmurat), the team’s star striker and a divorcée. This is the extent of her character development. The team’s grandmaster and sorta kinda coach/GM (Carina Lau Kar-ling) is semi-retired and pulling the strings from a mahjong parlour… somewhere, but she sends an emissary to carry out her will as a proxy. He’s Xu Feng (Exo boybander Lay Zhang), and the sparks fly between him and Shuangshuang (they really don’t) as he gets creative in his methods to teach her to calm the fuck down – seriously, she’s an abusive captain and a horrible person to be around – and let her bench play. Like the one who cries easily at the thought of her failed romance, Sangbiao (Hu Yuan), and the eager one with attitude, Chusan (Ai Mi). This is the extent of their character development. Despite the internal strife that’s resolved in about seven minutes, Emei mows down its opponenets – India, South Korea, Thailand – by deploying its physics-defying kung fu, en route to a championship berth against (wait for it) Japan, and their incredibly powerful Tiger kung fu (?) team.
I get it. Movies have demands that mean sometimes attractive actors “playing” football players have to be shot around. But there’s not a single woman on the cast that looks convincing as a footballer (which is an insult to women footballers) and so not a single moment in the film that creates any sense of sporting tension. None of the actors in Shaolin Soccer could score a goal but it felt like there were stakes, and there legitimate suspense in the story. This is not that. Maybe Chow opted for crap football so as not to draw attention to the crap kung fu. I get it. It’s not supposed to be realistic. It is, however, supposed to be funny, fantastical and, again, suspenseful within this world and it’s not. It’s just stupid. Performances that are mostly just a lot of yelling (on and off the totally fake pitch), with Zhang leading the hollering in lieu of demonstrating any sense of comic timing or substantial interiority don’t help. There are two semi-solid sight gags that involve drooling (because of course they do), but they’re essentially the same gag. That would be fine were the drool joke a running motif but the lazy script by Chow, newcomer Hunny Ho and – no shit – a dozen other credited writers don’t bother with standard narrative. And if anyone thought cameos by actual footballer Zhao Lina, MC Jin, Louis Cheung and Jimmy O Yang were going to draw attention away from the backwards stereotypes of the South Korean (who weaponise prettiness), Indian (they’re rubbery because… India?) and Australian (evidently giant, thuggish wypipo of German extraction?) teams, hoh hoh. I promise they do not. And the less said about the male actor playing the Japanese goalkeeper the better. No one on this production has the mojo required for pithy commentary on the hysteria over trans women in sport, rendering needless gag transphobic or just dumb. I’m going with the latter. One of the worst of 2026.