“Street Fighter:The Legend of Chun Li” is a significant improvement over the last attempt at turning the video game franchise into a film. Instead of being extremely bad, this version is only really bad.
In all seriousness, the movie suffers in everything from character motivation to fight choreography. All of that culminates to the worst scene in the movie. In a nightclub, Chun Li fights her assailants while a singer raps “Street fighter! Street fightin’!” Didn’t we learn anything from Vanilla Ice’s cameo in the second “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”
This new version was written by relative newcomer Justin Marks and is directed by Andrzej Bartowiak (“Doom,” “Cradle 2 the Grave”). It also has a decent cast attached to it. There’s Kristin Kreuk (“Smallville”) as Chun Li. There’s Neal McDonough (“Band of Brothers”) as M. Bison and Michael Clark Duncan (“The Green Mile”) as Balrog. There’s even Robin Shou (“Mortal Kombat,” “Beverly Hills Ninja”) as Chun Li’s trainer in martial arts.
The problems in this movie begin with the story. It seems to start out as a nice, simple revenge plot. Chun Li witnesses mob boss M. Bison snag her dad and take him off to a most perilous fate. And then she doesn’t do anything about it for another ten years or so. Suddenly a mysterious scroll appears and tells her that she has to give up her former way of life and live on the street. So, she does that, all the while providing corny narration, explaining the ins and outs of her journey through poverty that would eventually lead her to a secret order that exists to fight evil.
To be fair, most martial arts movies focus less on providing an entertaining story and more on providing really cool fighting scenes. In this respect, “Street Fighter” again screws up. It seems as if someone who saw other action movies and tried to do things that might look cool choreographed all of the fights in the movie. There’s lots of spinning and flipping and every so often, someone does a special move that comes in the form of a really big flip or spin that is often accompanied with a blurry camera.
“Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li” is not just a bad movie. It’s also a bad action movie, and bad martial arts movie and a bad movie based on a video game. “Street Fighter 4” came out recently to the X-Box 360 and PS3, so if you were planning on seeing the movie with friends, why not use your ticket money to chip in towards a copy of the game instead?