Review for The Champions

Introduction

2001 saw the release of Shaolin Soccer, the Stephen Chow comedy that told the tale of a football team, bending it like Bruce Lee. I found it to be hilarious, pretty much the only movie of the deadpan Stephen Chow that tickled my funny-bone. And I rated it for being a unique concept, something I had never seen before, and a comedy twist that broke new ground. At least that is what I thought. But as is so often the way with creativity, people were standing on the shoulder of giants, inspired by what had come before. Before there was Shaolin Soccer, there was The Champions, a Yuen Biao football kung-fu comedy from 1983. According to the commentaries, this is a film that hasn’t seen a lot of play since its original release. It’s something of a coup for Eureka to give it a Blu-ray release in the UK in 2024, its worldwide Blu-ray debut.


Lee Tong makes a living herding geese, carrying the burden for his crippled uncle, but he has to make a rapid exit from his quiet village when he humiliates the wrong person during the local festival. He winds up in the city where he catches the eye of Suen, the captain of a slum football team, when he applies the foot-fu he learned corralling waterfowl to a ball. He also manages to make a bad impression on Football King, a local hero and captain of a famous football club. Becoming professional footballers might just be the way out of the slums, but joining Football Kings corrupt team surely isn’t the way...

Picture

The Champions gets a 2.39:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on this disc, with the choice between PCM 2.0 Mono Original Cantonese, Alternate Cantonese (Japanese Theatrical Version), Restored Cantonese, and English dub, with optional translated subtitles. For once, I went with the Japanese Theatrical Cantonese audio. For the Japanese release, the film got a more contemporary, and poppy music soundtrack, as well as a theme song, recorded in English, and sung by Yuen Biao. I wasn’t going to miss that. The image is clear and sharp, with no sign of print damage or age. The colours are rich and consistent, contrast is good, and there is no visible compression. As with many Hong Kong widescreen films of this era, there is distortion at the edges of the frame in some scenes thanks to the anamorphic lensing, but it all works to bring out the absurdity of the kung-fu football action. The audio option I chose was fine, the dialogue was clear, and the action comes across well in a decently balanced and warm mono track. I switched two-thirds of the way through to the Restored Cantonese track, and other than the music, there was no technical difference. The subtitles are accurately timed and are free of typos.

The images used in this review were kindly supplied by Eureka Entertainment.

Extras

The disc boots to a static menu, and you’ll find the following extras on the disc...

Audio commentary with Frank Djeng and F. J. DeSanto
Audio commentary with Mike Leeder and Arne Venema
Superstar Football HK (18:41)
James Mudge on The Champions (14:51)
Original Theatrical Trailer (4:44)
Japanese Release Trailer (1:55)

The first run release of 2000 copies will come with a booklet on the film with writing from James Oliver, and limited edition o-card packaging.

Conclusion

The Champions doesn’t quite work, at least not in the way that Shaolin Soccer does, although that statement is only valid if the end goals are the same for both films. Shaolin Soccer is a comedy where a football team applies some kung-fu skills to excel in the sport. The Champions on the other hand is a kung-fu comedy where the martial arts technique in question is football. You have your unlikely hero in Lee Tong, with some natural talent, but no football skills to begin with. Instead of rival schools you have rival teams, the football skills that they develop are used to beat each other up, and the film concludes with a battle on the pitch where they put everything on the line. It’s a battle for honour, not to climb up a league.


It’s just the football then that makes this film stand out; otherwise it’s just another clichéd kung-fu movie, with the tropes present and correct. Thankfully it works well enough as a comedy to hold the attention; there are plenty of silly moments, and the characters are lively enough to carry the film. It’s also a little bizarre in how the story unfolds. It starts off in a rural village with no apparent technology, and everyone in traditional garb. It feels like the movie is set around the turn of the twentieth century. It’s only when Lee Tong gets to the city that things jump forward in time, and we see things like electricity and cars. Even still, the Western clothing that some people wear is indeterminate enough to place the film at any time from the latter half of the twentieth century, and it’s only the tightness of the football shorts that places it in the eighties.


Lee Tong is the country yokel at the start of the story, who looks like he’s out of his depth when he comes to the big city. But he’s adept enough with his feet to impress Suen when he kicks a ball into his face from a distance, leaving him bloody. Lee Tong decides discretion is the better part of valour when Suen comes after him, not knowing that Suen really wants to recruit him. But in his flight, he runs into Suen’s sister, who briefly looks to be a romantic interest, but who quickly fades to the background in the face of the bromance that develops between Tong and Suen. But it’s also at this point that Tong literally bumps into the antagonist of the film, Football King, and manages to humiliate him in the process.


When playing for a neighbourhood team doesn’t work out, given the propensity for matches do devolve into brawls, Tong and Suen try out for a professional team. That team turns out to be Football King’s and he’s not keen on letting these two upstarts play. But Tong accidentally gets recruited, so King takes the opportunity to get his revenge, humiliating him in turn, keeping him away from the football field. But Tong manages to find some way to train in secret. It turns out that the team is corrupt, and when the chance comes to make some serious money by throwing a match, King has the idea to put Tong into the team as a ringer. Little does he know that Tong is good enough at this point to win the match single-handed. And so the war between the two escalates.


The Champions would be a generic kung-fu comedy, were it not for the twist that the football is the kung-fu. It even has the clichéd opening sequence where the main characters demonstrate their skills before the movie begins, only this time these skills are with the ball. But if you’re a football fan, this is not football as you know it, with these matches unfolding on what look like five-a-side pitches, and with rules that make no sense whatsoever, even less sense than off-side. If you’re a kung-fu movie fan, then this is clichéd, predictable, but entertaining. You might appreciate the film even more if you’re in the intersection of that particular Venn Diagram.

The Champions Blu-ray is available direct from Eureka, from Terracotta, and from mainstream retailers.