Friday
27Feb2009
Movie Review - 'Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li'
Friday, February 27, 2009 at 2:42AM | Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-
Li
Starring Kristin Kreuk, Neal McDonough, and Chris
Klein  |
Back in the early 1990s, there was a video game called Street Fighter. It was one of the first arcade games
that let you choose the character you wanted to play, and each fighter in the game had different strengths and
weaknesses. Each combatant had different moves, too, which meant that as a player, you'd have invest probably hundreds
of dollars mastering the specific configuration of buttons, joystick directions and timing crucial to making those moves
work.
Street Fighter was therefore an enormous success. Some players wanted to play the beasts with superhuman
strength, and others wanted to go the more traditional, charismatic martial arts hero route. You could play
villains, too. The game was so popular that it spawned a movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, which was nowhere
near as popular.
Now Street
Fighter is back with the origin story of one of its characters, the seemingly
delicate Chun-Li. And because there are so many things wrong with this movie, the best way to approach it is just
to list them.
1 - Do we need a back story on a video game character? Aren't the people most interested in this film paying to
see fight scenes? Does anyone care that Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) is a concert pianist whose
father was kidnapped by the evil Bison (Neal McDonough), who is now a ruthless real estate
magnate? And does this origin story mean that somewhere in a brainstorming session, the crew at Capcom thought
we'd actually run through all the fighters, someday giving us Street Fighter: Hello Dhalsim?
2 - Andrzej
Bartkowiak is officially a lousy, perhaps entirely unqualified director. Here are
his credits: Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds, Cradle 2 the Grave, Doom, and this thing. But it's not just the
movies that precede Street Fighter that proves he's so lousy; The Legend of Chun-Li is a collection
a soft-boiled scenes of dramatic tension broken up by shoddy action sequences photographed poorly and edited to
hide how poorly they were photographed.
There isn't a single geniune incident or emotion in the entire movie, because Bartkowiak isn't capable of
directing a movie. A scene here or there, maybe, but he can't communicate to his cast, crew, and possibly himself
how the scene he's shooting works in unison with the scene he shot last week or will shoot next week. Each scene
is its own little movie, independent of everything else.
Watch the Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun- Li trailer
Reader Comments (6)
So I'm gonna guess you don't recommend seeing this one Colin? :P
You failed to answer the most important question. Does Chunli ever actually put on her classic outfit, because that is reason alone to see it.
Yeah, just came back from the theater, hoping that I would get "Batman and Robin" type corny, so-bad-its-good entertainment, and got a pretty awful film. I agree Chris Klein was awful, but not a tongue-in-cheek awful that you can laugh at- every line he delivered made me cringe. The fight scenes were average at best, poorly edited at worst, and man, I can't stand Neal McDonough- first 88 Minutes, now this?
Moon Bloodgood was looking fine as hell though, and I loved the line about "Even milk has an expiration date" or something- soo funny.
This is the proof that Hollywood have no ability to LEARN!
THOSE WHO CANNOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!!!
Shame it sounds like a bad movie, I really like Kristin Kreuk as an actress, wanted to see her do something other than smallville, cause don't really like her character in smallville. nway shame, still like to see whats so bad about it, maight see it, if it ever comes out in the UK
Maybe good as a guilty pleasure perhaps? found a competition to win copies of the DVD if you share my opinion http://thecelebritycafe.com/contests/street_fighter.html