The Champions (1983)

The Champions (1983)
Chinese Title: 波牛
Translation: Wave Cattle

 

Starring: Yuen Biao, Cheung Kwok-Keung, Moon Lee Choi-Fung, Dick Wei, Chang Ching-Po, Eddy Ko Hung, Gam Biu, Tong Tin-Hei, Tino Wong Cheung, Ho Pak-Kwong, Fung Ging-Ma
Director: Brandy Yuen
Action Director: Brandy Yuen

 

A sufficiently-talented action director can make a martial arts movie out of almost banal activity, if he puts his mind to it. Films like Shogun and the Little Kitchen and The Chinese Feast married martial arts and cooking sensibilities. The God of Gamblers films were able to mix kung fu with mahjong and roulette, when they weren’t busy having shoot-outs and inane comedy. The Magnificent Butcher has a classic kung fu calligraphy scene and The Mystery of Chess Boxing was able to derive a kung fu style from Chinese chess. Not bad for shaking things up.

Then there are those films that try to combine martial arts with other sports. Back in 2001, Stephen Chow made the hugely successful Shaolin Soccer, which mixed martial arts, soccer, and CGI to create sport sequences that looked as if the soccer players were the cast of Dragonball Z. It took several years for filmmakers to follow in suit, but we eventually got Kung Fu Dunk, Kung Fu Hip Hop, Beach Spike, and the violent Thai film Fire Ball. Some neophytes to Asian cult cinema may think that Shaolin Soccer was the first film to do this, but those people would be wrong. 18 years before Stephen Chow box-office smash reached theaters, Brandy Yuen (brother of Yuen Woo-Ping) and Yuen Biao (no relation to the Yuen Clan) came out with The Champions, the original kung fu soccer movie.

Yuen Biao plays a country bumpkin who knows a little kung fu and happens to be an acrobat of considerable prowess. He ends up going to the city where he becomes the towel boy for a popular soccer team, whose star player is played by Dick Wei. One day Yuen is asked to take Dick’s place during a game the latter hopes to throw. Unfortunately, Yuen is unaware of this fact and ends up kicking up a storm, thus winning the game and earning his teammates’ ire. After a big fight between Yuen and his teammates, he defects to a rival team and brings a friend of his (Cheung Kwok-Keung) onboard. Together, they lead their new team to the championships against Dick’s team.

That’s the plot in a nutshell, although I’m leaving out a lot of details. Some of them I didn’t catch on because the film I watched was in Chinese with Japanese subtitles. Also, like a lot of action-comedies made in Hong Kongduring the 1980s, there are A LOT of random asides and non-sequitur sight gags, a romantic subplot involving Moon Lee (whom Yuen Biao got to sleep with in the English version of Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain) that disappears as quickly as it’s brought up. My favorite random sequence is a scene set in a restaurant, where rivals Dick Wei and Cheung Kwok-Keung are dancing the tango with their respective girls, while secretly trying to beat each other up. It’s a wonderfully-choreographed and funny sequence that would be copied later on in Yuen Biao’s Shanghai, Shanghai (1990).

Most of the action is relegated to the football field, which is fine. The Champions is a kung fu soccer film, after all. There are lots of flying kicks, Pelé-inspired bicycle kicks, and painful-looking falls on display. Unlike Shaolin Soccer, which was dependent on special FX, the sports sequences here are more about showing of the physicality of the performers.

However, if you’re more of a fight person, there are some brawls here and there to be seen. An early scene has Yuen Biao fighting off some petty thieves when he arrives in THE CITY. A couple of early soccer matches end in brawls between Yuen Biao and the other players. There’s one out-of-place sequence in the movie is one where a bunch of men armed with wrenches and other heavy tools attack Yuen and Cheung. Yuen gets to show off some of his famous legwork in a fighting context here, but the scene is surprisingly violent. Several of the hired thugs get bloodied up really good and one guy even gets set on fire(!). That’s pretty strange, considering the rest of the film is essentially a PG action-sports-comedy.

The movie got nominated for the Best Action Design Award at the 1984 HK Film Awards, but lost to Sammo Hung’s Winners and Sinners. Brandy Yuen (or any of his brothers) wouldn’t be recognized for their efforts until the end of the decade, when Brandy worked with Sammo Hung on the classic The Pedicab Driver. A year later he worked as a martial arts consultant on the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. Shortly after that, Brandy became a devout Buddhist and made the film Master of Zen, which follows the life of Damo (aka Bodhidarma), the man who invented kung fu. I think he left the film industry at about that time, even though his brothers went on to bigger things.

The Champions is also notable for securing Yuen Biao’s popularity in Japan. I’ve commented before that Hong Kong audiences are extremely fickle people. Evidently Japanese people aren’t quite so much, and a good portion of Yuen’s fan base over the years has been made up of Japanese people. When the Nikkatsu studio tried (unsuccessfully) to save their studio with a historical epic back in the early 1990s, Yuen Biao was brought on to try to boost ticket sales. Said film was Setting Sun and ironically, it ended up being the nail in the coffin for Nikkatsu. Then, in 2002, Yuen Biao was hired to play the kung fu teacher in No Problem 2, a Japanese comedy about Chinese movies.

Moral of the story: it’s better to have a cult following in Japan than in Hong Kong.