Shaolin Girl (Shaolin Shojo) review

Couldn’t it just have been about a lacrosse team?

With the amount of hype Shaolin Girl got in Japan prior to its release, it either had to be a really good movie worth backing or a really bad movie that was too expensive to fail. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m inclined to go with the latter. Having been billed as a Japanese sequel to Stephen Chow’s massively successful “Shaolin Soccer”, it probably wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect this movie to be an action-packed sports comedy with soccer switched out for girls’ lacrosse. Unfortunately, however, the comedy is pretty sparse and the lacrosse elements are completely glossed over save a few clichéd lessons on teamwork and a sequence that runs through the closing credits. What’s the rest of the movie about? Well, that’s where things get a bit dicey.

Rin (Kou Shibasaki) has spent the past 9 years training at China’s Shaolin Temple to prepare herself to one day return to Japan and take over her late grandfather’s dojo. That day has finally come, and yet her teachers at the temple seem fearful that she’ll succumb to the “dark side” once she leaves their supervision. What does that mean, exactly? It’s as simplistic—and as lame—as it sounds.

When Rin arrives at her former dojo she finds it abandoned and in ruins. Her former sensei, Iwai (Yosuke Eguchi), is now working as a chef at his own Chinese restaurant which also employs a kindly young waitress named Minmin (Kitty Zhang) and two bumbling assistants played by “Shaolin Soccer” holdovers Chi Chung Lam and Kai Man Tin.

Iwai has completely given up on his Shaolin roots, but Rin is still determined to spread kung fu to Japan as her grandfather would have wanted. She finds a willing student in Minmin, whose only condition is that Rin join her university lacrosse team. Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to recruit new Shaolin disciples, Rin eagerly agrees.

As it turns out, Rin’s ability to jump 10 feet in the air and shoot lacrosse balls at warp speed has limited usefulness at first; she can’t seem to control where they end up. And, as Iwai bluntly points out, she drags her teammates down because she knows very little about the advantages of team cooperation. Over time her new friends teach her about the importance of passing the ball and communicating with each other as she teaches them how to use kung fu to accomplish amazing feats on the field—the kind that apparently help you win games 100-0 instead of a measly 6-5.

Here’s where things kind of fall off the cliff. The university president (Toru Nakamura) is a former member of the Shaolin dojo and has had his minions tracking Rin’s every move the entire time she’s been in Japan. His evil master plan? To goad Rin into unleashing all of her rage on him to prove which one of them is the strongest, of course. Apparently he wasn’t hugged enough as a child. What follows is a ridiculous series of action scenes that rip off pay homage to everything from Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” to Bruce Lee’s “Game of Death” and “Enter the Dragon”. The action isn’t all that bad, and Shibasaki certainly holds her own in fight scenes, but the heavy use of CGI throughout the film for everything from flying fried rice bowls to climbing up walls does steal some of her thunder when she actually does accomplish something that would otherwise be impressive.

This is not so much a movie as it’s a loosely-related string of events that plays like a brainstorm of ideas that got hastily thrown together at the last minute with little regard for coherence or poignancy. The actors involved did their best with the material they were given, but their individual talents were completely wasted on roles that either didn’t suit them or simply had no impact on the story. Probably the best example of this is using Takashi Okamura, one of Japan’s most well-known boke comedians, in an almost completely straight role as Ryuji the university administrator. Between these questionable decisions and a lackluster script, “Shaolin Girl” snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and winds up being just another forgettable CGI-laced action flick with nothing new or interesting to offer.

Watch trailer

Availability:

Japanese distributor Geneon released “Shaolin Girl” on region 2 DVD and region A Blu-ray with English subtitles on August 20, 2008. For DVD specs, see this link. For Blu-ray specs, see this link. The screencaps posted above are from the DVD version.

Malaysian distributor Sarawak Media Corporation will be releasing the film on region-free DVD with English and Malaysian subtitles on December 19, 2008. For full specs, see this link.

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