Film Review: Kung Fu Soccer 功夫女足 (2026) - China / Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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Stephen Chow has returned, and for two hours he makes the world feel young again.
Kung Fu Soccer is not a perfect film. The digital effects sometimes look like they were rendered on a machine that still remembers the year 2004. Certain gags announce themselves with the subtlety of a foghorn. And yet I left the theater lighter than I entered it, grinning like an idiot, and already wanting to see it again. That is the particular magic Chow has always possessed: the ability to take something slightly ridiculous and make it feel essential.
The story follows the Emei women’s football team, a collection of working women past the age when society expects them to still be dreaming. Their captain, Shuangshuang (Zhang Xiaofei), is nearly forty, iron-willed, and slightly terrifying. She trains the team as if their lives depend on it, which, in the exaggerated moral universe of a Stephen Chow film, they more or less do. Beside her is Yu Long (Dilraba Dilmurat), the gifted striker with whom she shares a complicated history. Into this combustible mix arrives Xu Feng (Lay Zhang), a sleek and slightly slippery mentor who may or may not be trustworthy.
What follows is pure Chow: physics-defying kicks, martial-arts techniques applied to the beautiful game with gleeful absurdity, and a tournament structure that allows the director to stage one set-piece after another of escalating lunacy. The action is joyful rather than brutal. The comedy arrives in broad, cartoonish waves. And underneath it all, almost shyly, is a story about middle-aged people refusing to accept that their best days are behind them.
Zhang Xiaofei is the film’s secret weapon. She plays Shuangshuang with a ferocious, slightly unhinged intensity that somehow never becomes caricature. You believe this woman would rather die than lose, and you also believe she is exhausted by the effort. Dilraba Dilmurat brings a wounded elegance to Yu Long, and Lay Zhang, against expectations, proves surprisingly adept at Chow’s brand of deadpan physical comedy. The supporting players—each given their own peculiar martial specialty—flesh out a team that feels lived-in rather than assembled for plot convenience.
Is the film nostalgic for Shaolin Soccer? Of course. Chow is revisiting the same playful collision of kung fu and sport that made him an international name a quarter-century ago. But this is not a simple remake with the genders flipped. The emotional temperature is different. The jokes land with the slightly melancholic edge of a filmmaker who knows time is moving faster than any of us would like. When the team finally begins to play as one, the moment carries a weight that pure slapstick cannot explain.
I have grown wary of the word “heartfelt” when applied to big commercial comedies. It is too often used as an apology for mediocrity. Kung Fu Soccer earns the word. It is silly, extravagant, occasionally clumsy, and deeply sincere about the idea that ordinary people can still surprise themselves. In an era of franchise calculation and algorithmic caution, there is something almost radical about a director who still believes the audience will follow him into pure, unembarrassed joy.
I walked out of the cinema wanting to kick a football as hard as I could, just to see if anything impossible might happen. That is the highest compliment I can pay. (Neo, 2026)