Shaolin Soccer: Viewer Comments

THE MOVIE: Overall this was a very funny movie. I've been lamenting quite a while over Stephen Chow's last couple year's of movies. It just seems he's lost his touch from the movies that really made me love his comedy (Saint of Gamblers, Royal Tramp, Tricky Brains, etc.) I haven't found any of his latest movies to be very funny at all. So I was glad to find this movie brought back some of his old school laughs. But be warned, the entire first half of the movie, except for a few choice moments, is really disjointed, random, and just boring. But, from the moment when they finally form their full soccer team, it gets HILARIOUS! And the action gets very cool. Yes it's way way over the top action that only HK cinema can provide, but taking into account that it's supposed to be silly, it's really very enjoyable. Be warned though, although this movie features the most "modern" use of computer graphics I've seen in a HK movie, many of the effects are very poorly done & look obviously fake in comparison to the much more polished & higher budget stuff we're used to seeing in US cinemas. In many scenes the special effects look more like hand drawn cartoons than computer shaded models. But once again, for a HK movie this is still really good & since the movie isn't trying to be super realistic or serious, the shortcomings of some of the effects can be easily overlooked & don't get in the way of enjoying the movie. From the middle of the movie on, there won't be more than a few minutes when you're not laughing or at the very least being very entertained.

VIDEO QUALITY: Not half bad for a HK DVD, anamorphic widescreen, though the menus aren't. Image is pretty good, though in general it's just a little too soft & grainy. At no point is the video good enough to really jump off the screen at you, but it's never that bad that it distracts you. Colors are rendered fairly well, but flesh tones can vary wildly from one scene to another. When the DVD first enters it's menu it plays this 20 second long clip from the movie. This is kinda' cool the first time, but gets really annoying when you have to sit thru this 20 sec clip every single time you switch from any one category of the menu to another. Also, being the "special edition" it doesn't actually have any extra movie footage, it just adds behind the scenes footage. It's kinda' like the white rabbit feature in the Matrix, when you see the white rabbit icon, click "enter" and it'll take you to a short making of documentary about that scene. But in this movie, you can't control whether the icon appears or not, it always appears and it gets kinda' annoying. But other than those fairly minor complaints, the video is quite acceptable.

SOUND QUALITY: First of all, let me say that the DTS soundtrack is for the Cantonese soundtrack only, the Mandarin one is in DD 5.1 & is a pretty decent mix, with really heavy bass on multiple occasions & decent use of surrounds. Probably among the most notably decent sound mixes I've heard from a HK movie. At certain points in the movie when the deep bass hits, it really hits your subwoofer, but at certain times it seems the sound crew got a little bass happy and cranked the bass level overboard, with certain scenes having excessively boomy & sloppy bass. But I guess better to have more bass than not enough. FINAL WORD: Don't let the first half of the movie prevent you from sitting through the whole thing, it really gets better from the second half on. All in all, a very enjoyable movie, with very decent video & above average sound. It's good to see Stephen Chow getting funny again.