Stephen Chow once made impossible football feel strangely tangible. In Shaolin Soccer, a player could launch a ball like artillery and the joke still depended on bodies, timing, impact, and people you wanted to see succeed. Kung Fu Soccer returns to that basic fantasy with Team Emei, a women’s martial arts squad entering the 16-team Supreme and Invincible Cup, yet the sensation has changed. The kicks are bigger. The effects are louder. The excitement is thinner.
Chow’s first feature since The New King of Comedy also continues his habit of revisiting earlier work through female protagonists. Here, Zhang Xiaofei plays Shuangshuang, Emei’s nearly 40-year-old captain and coach, while Dilraba Dilmurat plays Jade, her former best friend and returning striker.
Their team faces superhuman opponents from across the Asia-Pacific region, with every match inviting another excuse to bend physics. What should feel liberating soon feels oddly mechanical. The film remembers the ingredients of Shaolin Soccer. It has forgotten how they once made us care.
A Friendship Left on the Sideline
Shuangshuang gives the film its strongest chance at an emotional spine. She has devoted her life to martial arts and football, approaches leadership with near-comic aggression, and carries years of resentment toward Jade, who left the team to marry before returning after her divorce. Zhang Xiaofei plays that anger at full volume, sometimes making Shuangshuang exhausting, yet there are flashes of hurt beneath the shouting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGArKe8_Uo
Dilmurat gives Jade a lighter, cockier energy. The difference between them could have powered the whole film. Their arguments hint at two women who made opposite choices and now have to confront what those choices cost them. Childhood flashbacks supply the history, but they arrive as information rather than lived memory. We learn why the friendship fractured without feeling its loss.
That becomes the recurring problem with Team Emei. Most teammates exist through a single trait, so victories and setbacks rarely change how we feel about the group. Sisley Choi’s 88 fares better. Her deadpan presence as the blind masseuse repeatedly cuts through the film’s frantic comic rhythm, especially because Choi refuses to compete with everyone else’s screaming.
Lay Zhang’s Xu Feng also gets one of the better sequences when a misunderstanding with Shuangshuang keeps escalating because neither character properly reads the other. For a few minutes, Chow lets timing create the joke instead of digital spectacle.
Football Without the Rush
The tournament should be where Kung Fu Soccer catches fire. Team Emei has little money, inadequate facilities, internal conflict, betrayal, a departure, and the inevitable reconciliation before facing the Japanese champions. Those are familiar sports-film beats because they work when each stage increases our investment in the team.
Here, the matches rarely generate that pressure. Players launch themselves through the air, hammer opponents with martial arts attacks, and summon oversized animals or weapon-like effects, yet the football itself barely registers. Passing, positioning, tactical adjustments, and the accumulating anxiety around a goal are mostly irrelevant. At times, the matches resemble elimination fights where the ball happens to be nearby.
That distinction matters because absurdity still needs rules. Shaolin Soccer understood that the fun came from watching martial arts abilities transform recognizable football situations. A ridiculous shot still had a goalkeeper to beat. A supernatural tackle still occurred inside a contest whose rhythm we understood.
Action director Qin Pengfei gives Kung Fu Soccer constant motion, but little weight. Players float through green-screen spaces, stadiums resemble unfinished game environments, and major impacts dissolve into digital noise. A kick can supposedly carry monstrous force while looking strangely frictionless. The body leaves the ground, the screen erupts, and nothing lands.
The Joke Keeps Moving
Chow’s mo lei tau instincts are still visible everywhere. Characters yell, flail, misunderstand one another, change direction without warning, and treat physical reality as a suggestion. Some of that remains funny. 88’s straight-faced reactions work precisely because Choi gives the chaos something solid to bounce against.
Too many other jokes feel like relics dragged onto a newer pitch. The Japanese goalkeeper gag involving a male performer lands as cheap provocation, while rival teams are reduced to blunt national caricatures. The Koreans are beauty-obsessed schemers, Australians are defined by physical aggression, Indian players by yogic flexibility, and the Japanese champions by excessive violence. These ideas do not reveal character. They merely provide another loud thing to happen.
The parade of cameos, including Jimmy O. Yang, MC Jin, Takeru Satoh, Avantgardey, and Zhao Lina, creates brief jolts of recognition without changing the film’s emotional temperature. Even the late connection to Shaolin Soccer and the tease involving Fung feel less like earned continuation than a reminder of a film whose energy still hangs over this one.
The saddest part is how often Kung Fu Soccer seems one adjustment away from finding itself. Let Shuangshuang and Jade’s history breathe. Let Team Emei become people rather than punchlines. Let a match build around a goal instead of another effect. The film keeps sprinting past those opportunities, chasing bigger spectacle while the feeling it needs remains somewhere back near midfield.
Kung Fu Soccer premiered in mainland China on July 11, 2026, and expanded to Hong Kong on August 13, 2026. This sports comedy follows a grassroots women’s football team called Emei that defies expectations by combining traditional martial arts techniques with soccer skills to compete in a high-stakes Asian championship.
Where to Watch Kung Fu Soccer (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Kung Fu Soccer
Distributor: Maoyan Entertainment, Encore Films
Release date: July 11, 2026 (China), August 13, 2026 (Hong Kong)
Rating: 13
Running time: 106 minutes
Director: Stephen Chow
Writers: Stephen Chow, Hunny Ho, Man Keung Chan, Chi Chung Lam, Chi-Man Wan, Wing Hong Wong
Producers and Executive Producers: Stephen Chow, Zheng Zhihao
Cast: Zhang Xiaofei, Dilraba Dilmurat, Lay Zhang, Carina Lau, Takeru Satoh, Ai Mi, Sisley Choi Si-Pui, Zhao Lina
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Zhao Xiaofeng
Editors: Yeung Kai-wing
Composer: Raymond Wong Ying-Wah
The Review
Kung Fu Soccer
Kung Fu Soccer keeps reaching for the giddy feeling of impossible goals and bodies flying across a pitch, yet its digital spectacle rarely gives those moments any physical or emotional charge. Zhang Xiaofei and Dilraba Dilmurat find sparks inside Shuangshuang and Jade’s fractured friendship, while Sisley Choi steals laughs with 88’s wonderfully dry presence. The tournament itself feels strangely distant. Weak CGI, thin teammates, tired stereotypes, and matches with little sporting tension leave Stephen Chow chasing the spirit of Shaolin Soccer without rediscovering its warmth.
PROS
- Sisley Choi’s deadpan comedy
- Committed central performances
- Occasional effective visual gags
- Energetic absurdist premise
CONS
- Weightless football action
- Weak digital effects
- Thin supporting characters
- Dated cultural stereotypes
- Little emotional investment in the tournament
