Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

Not since BALLISTIC: ECKS VS SEVER has so much potential for a video game-to-movie adaptation been so completely wasted. STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI is quite simply an embarrassment and cannot crawl into ignoble obscurity fast enough despite a disastrous box office run that makes its oft maligned 1994 predecessor starring Jean-Claude Van Damme look like THE DARK KNIGHT.

The $50 million CHUN-LI barely cobbled together $5 million on its opening weekend and was handed a nearly 70% drop the following week. I may not have faith in Hollywood but I still have faith in the rest of humanity.

I’m about to savage this movie like no other but I’ve made a promise to myself not to get too personal. I really don’t know who screwed up or who tried their best to salvage this pile of crap and I don’t care. CHUN-LI was doomed from the start and should have never been greenlit in the first place. Anything that came after the conceptual stage may or may not have been an improvement.

Not that anyone should expect great storytelling to spring forth from a video game but even by genre standards, the script and story are bad. Here’s where they went right and wrong.

The STREET FIGHTER game franchise now has over 80 characters, many of them with their own back stories so the decision to focus on just a handful of the more popular ones was a good decision. It was also not a bad idea to discard the two main characters, Ken and Ryu, and focus on Chun-Li, easily the most popular female character in the series. Further ditching the tournament venue is arguably a good decision seeing as how we’ve already seen enough of that with the MORTAL KOMBAT and DOA films.

From there, the set up goes bad with Chun-Li’s original quest to avenge her father’s death by bringing down crime syndicate boss M. Bison being given milquetoast treatment. Instead of having to fight in the tournament as an undercover Interpol agent, Chun-Li, now a concert pianist with a foundation in contemporary wushu, drops everything after receiving an ancient scroll to travel to Bangkok and live among the poor in hopes of finding Gen, a mysterious individual who can supposedly translate it.

At this point the movie is already sucking wind with Chun-Li aimlessly wandering the streets of Bangkok while narrating as if this were a basic cable travelogue.

Kristin Kreuk is looking frail and impish with no suggestion of fighting prowess, which is nothing like her video game counterpart. Where are those fabulous thunder thighs? All we get to suggest Kristin is Chun-Li is a variation on the white boots she sports in one scene and her hair tied in buns during a strange lesbian-tinged bump and grind/wire-fu combo sequence in a dance club. That scene ends with Chun-Li performing a spinning handstand special attack I seem to recall from my limited experience with the game and it looks awful but the same could be said for most of the fight sequences even though Hong Kong movie veteran Dion Lam is listed as fight choreographer. It doesn’t help when none of your leads have much screen fighting experience, save for Robin Shou.

As Bison, Neal McDonough is delivering one his hammiest performance dripping with sardonicism, evil overlord clichés and a strange accent, all ripe for parody if not for the fact that we’ve seen it all before countless times and often done better. He has settled in Bangkok to orchestrate a hostile take over of a criminal organization and force out locals in a slum in order to build new, high-rent commercial property. How original. Interestingly, all of his evil deeds are shown off camera, sometimes literally just a few inches from view. Why not just put a big “censored” black bar over the offending scenes to keep censors happy? It wouldn’t be any more obvious.

There is this back story to Bison that involves killing his wife and channeling his conscience into his infant daughter. I don’t know if that has any relevance to the game series but it does nothing for the movie. It suggests that Bison might have a less evil lifestyle had he not used unexplained superpowers to will his conscience out of his body. There are plenty of people in this world, unfortunately, who do not need superpowers to get the same results. The whole thing seems pretty corny to me.

As lead henchman, Balrog, Michael Clarke Duncan seemingly spends more time handing Bison memos than using his girth for bashing things. When Duncan is on the screen all I want to see him do is destroy, not play secretary. They could make a movie with Jaleel White as “Steve Urkel” from FAMILY MATTERS falling into a vat of steroids and Red Bull and Michael Clarke Duncan emerging, without makeup or effects, to destroy Tokyo and I’d pay to see it in a heartbeat.

On the side is Chris Klein as “super cool” Interpol agent Charlie Nash with the long flowing hair and high forehead that suggests we may have a new Nicholas Cage waiting in the wings. Regardless, he looks positively baked in every shot and it makes me wonder if he thought he was playing a corrupt undercover narcotics officer instead. While tracking down Bison, he spends most of his time delivering canned reactions and calls to action when he isn’t trying to suck face with his partner Maya Sunee (Moon Bloodgood), a local detective assigned to investigate Bison’s activities in Bangkok. Neither of these two have much of anything substantial to do in helping bring down Bison except in joining a mob of local police in having a bland shootout at the end.

Eventually, Chun-Li hooks up with Gen and we enter the second training phase of the movie. The first was a short montage at the beginning of the movie where she is learning flowery wushu with her father who is secretly an Interpol agent.

No offense to wushu practitioners the world over but this performance art is not exactly the best martial arts to be learning if you intend to beat up bad guys outside of choreographed floor demonstrations or, well, movies. Chinese filmmakers usually know the difference between contemporary wushu and traditional or self defense-oriented wushu. That’s why in Chinese movies you don’t see masters graduates in wushu walk out of the Beijing Sports University and beat up masked criminals on their way home. But thanks to the wonders of invisible wires, CGI and post-production editing, amateur contemporary wushu becomes a deadly art capable of turning someone into a human tornado of spinning legs and fireball-blasting power moves, or at least that’s what I can only assume since the fight scenes have been cut up and pasted together like a teaser trailer viewed through a spinning fan. Actually, that’s exactly what the fight scenes look like, teaser trailers of a longer sequence we never get to see. There are too many camera angles, too many cuts and too much artificiality to feel any immediacy or connection with what’s happening on screen. The same can be said of the drama with its horribly clichéd dialogue, stiff and disconnected acting, and uneasy combination of fantasy and reality.

The main problem with CHUN-LI, aside from just about everything, is that the film takes a very colorful and expressive action franchise and turns it into a bland, made-for-TV movie that discards almost everything that makes STREET FIGHTER compelling in favor of completely uninspired, regurgitated junk barely held together by an illusion of glossy production standards. Even that is clumsily handled with horrid editing, cheap money shot camera tricks and lousy visual effects. From early pictures and the trailer I knew this is exactly what would happen. The vision for this movie was plain wrong and the investors are suffering for it, not to mention the poor saps, like myself, who actually sat through it.

I’ll tell you what STREET FIGHTER should be, it should be straight out nuts with big-haired and big-muscled freaks in whacked out costumes blasting each other into dust with super-powered combos from start to finish. It should take the viewer and drop-kick them straight out of reality and into an alternative realm where fighting lunacy can exist, not unlike MORTAL KOMBAT. It should be, you know, fun? It should have the mergence of effects, martial arts, colorful characters, and cleverness that Stephen Chow delivered in KUNG FU HUSTLE. Remember that giant Buddha’s Palm blast at the end of that movie? That’s the kind of insanity a live-action STREET FIGHTER needs. But first it needs a vision, which is what this movie lacked. All I saw was a weak attempt to cash in on a popular franchise and there’s already enough of that going on.

Final verdict: ignore this movie and, if you don’t have it already, go out and buy a copy of STREET FIGHTER IV, Capcom’s latest entry in their video game series instead. If you’re not the twitchy thumbs type, there is an anime feature adaptation that Capcom released in Japan last month. Unfortunately, early buzz suggests it’s not as action-packed at fans had hoped. Perhaps Capcom should stick to making games. I shudder to think what a live-action DEVIL MAY CRY will look like.