少林少女 review - what the hell where they thinking?

Decided to go see 'Shaolin Girl'(少林少女) at the last minute after I got home from work the other night.  In case you're not familiar,  'Shaolin Girl' is a Japanese movie that was co-produced by Stephen Chow, creator of the worldwide hit 'Shaolin Soccer'...  

[btw - Shaolin Soccer was a hit in Japan as well... its one of the few HK movies that most of my regular Japanese friends know...]Click for japanese trailer

Shaolin Girl is similar to Shaolin Soccer in that it revolves around a girl named Rin (played by Japanese singer/actress Shibasaki Kou)  with super powerful Shaolin Martial arts ability trying to do sports,  in this case lacrosse (I didn't even know they had lacrosse in Japan!?!) --  so you get some cool visuals of people playing sports using super human powers to shoot balls at super-sonic speeds, glowing w/ fire and qi, etc etc. 

It even features two of the Shaolin brothers from Shaolin Soccer, the qinggong fat guy and the iron shirt glasses guy.... but more importantly, it also has Kitty Zhang, who you may have seen in Stephen Chow's recent film 'CJ7'....

gah!  actually she has a lot more screen time in this film then she does in CJ7 - she plays a Chinese exchange student who befriends Rin and introduces her to the lacrosse team at the nearby university...

(before you ask - no, I didn't just go see this movie to see cute Japanese college girls in Lacrosse uniforms...)

OK, should be a safe bet for a film though, right?  Take a proven funny idea and remake it with funny actors, attractive girls... how can you go wrong?  Well it wasn't easy, but apparently they found a way to turn it into a POS!

The story gets convoluted with a strange evil university president as the main antagonist...  although I never really figured out what the hell he was trying to do with his evilness...  

The movie started out shakily,  but it was on its formulaic way until we get to the second half - at that point it departs from the Shaolin Soccer story and turns into a strange martial arts action film, in which the girl has to fight through a pagoda of thugs to try to save Kitty Zhang from the evil university president (who's hobby is apparently fighting people with karate and then retiring to his evil 'Game of Death'-style Pagoda on campus. I think it was trying to ALSO copy Kungfu Hustle at this point, right down to the costume:

Anyway, at this point in the film I was so confused and annoyed...  "what the hell were they thinking?" kept popping up in my head... it was like this was supposed to be two separate poorly conceived plots, and they decided to combine them into one...  people in the audience just started groaning audibly towards the end too...

After about 30-45 minutes of this she finally defeats the bad guy, saves Kitty Zhang and everyone's happy.  I'm thinking 'So wait, what happened to the Lacrosse stuff?!? I guess they gave up on that....'  but then suprisingly just as the credits come up,  they show a super long montage of scenes of the team going all the way to the finals and winning the championship before huge giant sell-out crowds (similar to the last 1/2 of Shaolin Scocer... except at this point its already during the end credits!)  -- production cost wise I was even more puzzled,  it seemed like they spent a LOT of time and money making all those scenes for 2-3 minutes worth of footage during the closing credits...

Here's a few examples:

NOTE: All of these scenes occur during the credits afterthe movie is OVER... What the hell were they thinking? I'm just guessing, but perhaps something weird must have happened during the production of this movie like the director quit or the movie company sent it back for a complete rewrite half-way through...

Lesson of the Day:If you're going to make a knock off of Shaolin Soccer,  just follow the formula and remake a sports movie...  don't suddenly switch gears and try to ALSO remake Kungfu Hustle and put them in the SAME movie...

Oh,  before I forget, let me also point out that they had some Japanese actors playing Shaolin monks in the beginning with absolutely atrocious Mandarin...  can't believe they didn't dub them over.... I think they did dub over Kitty Zhang's voice for the Japanese...

And last but not least, as a martial arts enthusiast, the other major problem was the fact that few, if any, of the actors had much of a martial arts background...  some of the stances and poses were quite bad.  They try to use CG and wires to cover up during the fight scenes...  with mixed results.

anyway, I'll give it a 3/10...  I think I can only recommend it for the fact that Kitty Zhang is in there. :-P