Most critics like Shaolin Soccer, and they like it for the same reason: the football sequences, in which Stephen Chow’s kung-fu players bend the ball and the laws of physics. The praise clusters on the effects and the acrobatic stunts, with more than one review pointing to the care in the gags, including ones planted early that pay off much later. Chow himself is credited as the main draw, his playful approach holding the comedy and the action together. A few critics also warm to the film’s gentler side, noting how the team is built from socially isolated misfits.
The reservations are mild and the spread is narrow, from the low sixties to around ninety. Slant finds the antics crude as often as inspired, and points out that the American release is substantially cut. The Guardian suspects it will delight schoolboys more than football fans, and Radio Times, the coolest of the nine, treats it as a cartoonish underdog comedy whose action is its one real attraction.