Soccer Goodness vs. Cineplex Evil

SHAOLIN SOCCER DIRECTED BY STEPHEN CHOW HELLBOY DIRECTED BY GUILLERMO DEL TORO

DON'T JUDGE Miramax too harshly for letting Shaolin Soccer sit on a shelf for at least a year; they know the times are all wrong for a movie so devoid of cynicism. These are Hellboy days. Miramax was probably unsure of the treasure they had (speaking in art, not box-office, terms). Pure entertainment like Shaolin Soccer is an endangered species.

By "pure" I don't mean goody-goody pomposity but a point of view unsullied by the nihilistic taste that has become the new sentimentality of hipsters and video geeks-the Pulp Fiction-Fight Club-Memento kids, many of whom are actually, chronologically adults. In a lament for the "heroic" age of moviegoing, essayist Philip Lopate once wrote that "the adolescent wants to touch bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment." Lately, film culture has been run by grown-ups still in that stage of arrested development. The teenage thrill for comic books and kung-fu movies has calcified into a snobbish preference for bloody manga, the dreary Orientalism of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and worse. By those standards Shaolin Soccer is goofy; it lacks the menace that teenagers mistake for mature feeling, not realizing that even insensate kids can harbor thoughtless malice.

The film's unexpectedly simple concept comes from its star and auteur Stephen Chow, a martial arts whiz like Jim Carrey with nunchucks. Chow concocted this story of an underdog soccer team battling a steroid-enhanced team of toughs to be as simple as a child's storybook. In fact, he goes back to the beginnings of chop-socky movies as one delightedly imagines their origins. (Their mid-70s introduction via Bruce Lee laid the foundation of gangster-movie-type vengeance.) Life and Death are not at stake in Shaolin Soccer; the big soccer championship has to do with pride, honor, self-esteem, virtue, fun. It's the style of moral abstraction that has been forgotten even in movies as convoluted as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which tried so hard to be art that it was neither elating nor intelligible.

Chow himself plays Sing, a young, unemployable monk who is encouraged by a lame, former soccer star Fung (Ng Man-tat) to lead a team of soccer players against Fung's ex-teammate now despotic team-owner Hung (Patrick Tse). Sing must revive a disillusioned bunch of men, his classmates in the study of the Shaolin, each wasting a special skill. He whips them into shape-into camaraderie-Dirty Dozen style. When they prepare for the soccer tournament, they're actually readying themselves to face the world again. That is, they act to fulfill and improve themselves. If this premise sounds corny, it's only because the filmmaking we've become accustomed to places such low priority on idealism and personal recovery. The big game that climaxes Shaolin Soccer is an epic comedy of pratfalls and ambition. Hope-in the form of a soccer ball that turns into a raging tiger as it races toward a goalie's net-is illustrated in Chow's fast-paced, delirious style that can be described as slapstick existentialism. Shaolin Soccer isn't as visually resplendent as Torque, yet it feels just as liberating. It's meant to inspire as well as entertain, but the former term is loathed in a jaded popular culture.

Hellboy is entertainment for gremlins. The story features a baby demon who slips into the corporeal world during a Nazi occult experiment but is raised to fight for right by g-man Professor Broom (John Hurt) of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. For any straight-thinking person, this premise is worse than corny. It's insipid. As directed by horror film specialist Guillermo Del Toro, Hellboy gives off the stench of mediocrity, not sulfur. Because Del Toro lacks Chow's appreciation of goodness, he feels justified to play around with evil as an excuse for cheap, violent thrills and banal visual etudes. (Way late in the story chronologically, the film's single best shot shows a young adult Hellboy-played by the hulking Ron Perlman-standing with his coat flapping in a sculptural pose perpendicular to some modernist architecture. Proof that Del Toro doesn't know Nazi iconography from any other, it's just fodder.)

Celebrating a bad-boy superhero is such an inane, adolescent idea. That it comes from a comic book series by Mike Mignola is no excuse. Hellboy has the dim-mindedness of stoners who shout "roganroll!" at a guitar solo. This crushingly unimaginative flirtation with "the dark side" was made from a standpoint diametrical to Shaolin Soccer. Despite a good-vs.-evil premise, the movie abjures optimism. Reveling in Nazi paranoia, Del Toro and co-story-writer Peter Briggs pretend the same pseudo-seriousness that Bryan Singer faked in Apt Pupil. The basic appeal is to what Pauline Kael called "Nazi junkies," but it also panders to the craving for sardonic disenchantment. Only an utter fool would find this flamboyant nihilism novel or interesting.

Hellboy means to flatter the worst adolescent instincts by making its "hero" a misfit with one regular arm and one made of stone (presumably to fit a keyhole to the darkside but more likely to suggest that Gilbert Gottfried joke about a muscular, over-practiced jack-off hand). In his awkwardness, Hellboy is unable to woo Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), the pyro-kinetic young woman (a firestarter) who is also unaware of how to handle her puberty. These metaphors are much less elegant-and less witty-than the acned girl Mui (Vicki Zhao) who sublimates her sexuality by making sweet buns or the overweight and balding soccer players in Shaolin Soccer. Coming so soon after the gay subtext of X-Men 2, these hormonal conditions seem even more unoriginal and tiresome. Perlman plays Hellboy as an innocuous galoot, not so different from his role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's visionary City of Lost Children. This time his misunderstood miscreant recalls Adam Sandler's hell-born dork in Little Nicky but with a duller sense of humor. His scenes of yearning with comically anxious Selma Blair drag the film's sardonicism into the realm of the maudlin, like Perlman's short-lived tv series Beauty and the Beast.

Del Toro takes such a long time to tell this story, stopping for the predictable f/x set-pieces with squid-like monsters, shoot-outs, subway trains and explosions, that the experience is like watching an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That serial tv drama was the epitome of a glib, nihilistic idea taken to absurd, "normalizing" extremes. No wonder rock-music-oriented critics loved it; Buffy the Vampire Slayer manipulated the hoary teenage narcissism and despair found in rock music cliche. Hellboy attempts the same, as Del Toro swings from ghoulishness to gags (when B.P.R.D. wonk Rupert Evans hands him an extra ammunition belt, Hellboy apologizes, "I didn't get you anything.") One reason such humor lays so flat owes to what is now a familiar sardonicism that a pampered generation of consumers confuses for wit. It's tired-and to judge from the bored response of the preview audience critics were forced to endure Hellboy with, it probably won't go over like Ghostbusters.

The deserved flop of Hellboy won't prove anything unless it is paralleled with the deserved success of Shaolin Soccer. At some point in movie culture, optimism has to triumph over cynicism. (Although Hellboy is no more than what those who object to The Passion of the Christ deserve. It may be what they prefer: violence without meaning. A thrill-ride for the faithless.) Problem is, will those people who-I guarantee-will have a good time at Shaolin Soccer, realize that during the film's breezy-brief 96 minutes they have reconnected with the best reasons for going to the movies?

Shaolin Soccer offers the affirmation of the audience's humanity that Pulp Fiction-Fight Club-Memento, even The Lord of the Rings, lacks. Although Shaolin Soccer seems to belong to the martial arts genre, it is distinguished by its comic good-nature. The genial Sing performs his stunts with eye-popping daring; he's an athlete of goodwill rather than vengeance, a turnabout from the malicious behavior that Tarantino and Wu-Tang Clan have emphasized from their Hong Kong movie exposure. Chow's affectionate affect-which probably has more to do with the fullness of the Chinese response to martial arts movies than the retaliation Americans normally associate with the form-is satirized when legions of workers stop in their daily routines for synchronized Shaolin performances. Chow's approach to cinema (he triumphantly resurrects the old banana peel gag) is sporty and quintessentially humane. Strange that several young parents have asked me if Shaolin Soccer will be suitable for their grade-school children when, in fact, its most healthful effect might be on adults who have seen too much mayhem and degradation under the ruse of entertainment. There's got to be a way to cleanse our movie palettes. Refusing Hellboy shouldn't mean a return to childhood. As the veteran champion Fung tells Sing, "There must be a fusion of mind and foot." Take that to mean movies and soul.