Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Review [2]

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 03.05.2009

Is it possible that Jean-Claude Van Damme's movie will somehow be known as the best live-action Street Fighter film to date, or does this one have what it takes?

Directed by: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Written by: Justin Marks

Starring:
Kristin Kreuk - Chun-Li
Neal McDonough - M. Bison
Chris Klein - Charlie Nash
Michael Clarke Duncan - Balrog
Taboo - Vega
Robin Shou - Gen
Moon Bloodgood - Detective Maya Sunee
Edmund Chen - Xiang Huang
Josie Ho - Cantana
Elizaveta Kiryukhina - Rose




Running Time: 96 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and martial arts action, and some sensuality.

Within the heavily and deservedly maligned film genre of video game adaptations, there is a smaller sub-genre of fighting games that have found their way to the big screen. Fighting games have been a popular part of the gaming culture for years, particularly with the release of Street Fighter II in 1991 by Capcom. It was considered a revolutionary game and kicked off a “versus” fighting game surge that saw the release of games such as Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Tekken and more. It also eventually caught the attention of Hollywood and in 1994, Street Fighter hit theaters starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and Raul Juila as M. Bison. The movie was an unmitigated disaster with critics, yet made almost $100 million worldwide on a thirty-five million dollar budget. To this day, it is memorable both for the poor reception it received among fans of the game and for being Julia’s last film before his unfortunate death stemming from stomach cancer. Since then, fans have been hoping for a film adaptation of the video game that would erase the bad taste the Van Damme film left in everyone’s mouth. And so, with 20th Century Fox hoping to buck the trend of poor video game films, we get Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li starring Kristin Kreuk, Neal McDonough, Chris Klein and Michael Clarke Duncan.

The film focuses on the origin story of Chun-Li (Kreuk), a young girl with dreams of being a concert pianist. Chun-Li has a very close relationship with her father Xiang (Chen), a well-connected businessman who teaches her the martial arts and encourages her to follow her dreams. Unfortunately Xiang runs afoul of Bison (McDonough), a sinister businessman and criminal lord who heads an organization called Shadaloo, and his henchman Balrog (Duncan). Robbed of her father, Chun-Li grows up wanting vengeance, a desire which becomes a possibility when she receives a mysterious scroll beckoning her to Bangkok to find a man known as Gen (Shou). Gen is a former member of Shadaloo who has turned his back on the criminal organization and offers to teach Chun-Li how to fight them. Meanwhile, Interpol agent Charlie Nash (Klein) has also shown up in Bangkok on a life’s pursuit to hunt down Bison. He teams up with Bangkok gangland crime detective Maya Sunee (Bloodgood) and attempts to take the man down himself. Of course, it is not long before Chun-Li runs afoul of Nash in her quest for justice, and as they try individually to take the crime lord down, the body count of people out to kill them starts to rise.

In order to bring Street Fighter to the big screen a second time, 20th Century Fox hired screenwriter Justin Marks to handle the script. Marks, it is obvious even before checking, has never handled a big Hollywood film before, as his inexperience shows clear through. He takes what should be a relatively simple and straight-forward concept and weaves a horrible intricate and entirely unbelievable plot involving shady real estate deals, spiritual rituals to remove one’s conscience, training montages and mysterious cargo arrivals. Along the way he forgets the most important things; creating characterizations that make any remote sort of sense and plot points that aren’t half-thought out. Marks seems far more interested in providing either supposedly cool or supposedly sexy moments, and most of the time fails in both. There is a half-hearted attempt to create a sort of sexually-charged working tension between Maya and Nash which goes nowhere and equally uncommitted effort to create something out of the back story of Bison. It seems as if Marks provided several ideas which may have been good only to never fully flesh them out, and it creates an impossibly weak narrative throughout the movie. Along the way we also get some of the most clichéd martial arts dialogue seen in years, punctuated by a horribly written narration by Chun-Li throughout. We learn in a few seconds that Chun-Li spends a massive amount of time in Bangkok before she encounters Gen and starts her training, however it is this “tell, don’t show” philosophy that ruins the movie and strips the main character down to her barest essentials, creating a lead part that just doesn’t seem interesting enough to base a movie around.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters that the cast is horribly picked. Kristin Kreuk may have been an engaging actress on TV’s Smallville, but as Chun-Li she’s simply too bland to provide any real anchor for the film. It’s not as if she’s performing Shakespeare here, but while she tries her hardest she fails to take the weak material and make enough of a compelling heroine to care for. She is miscast much like Mila Kunis was in the video game-based bomb Max Payne in that you just never believe her capable of being the bad-ass she’s supposed to be. Meanwhile, opposite her is Neal McDonough, who has been in bad film after bad film as of late, between The Hitcher, 88 Minutes, I Know Who Killed Me and now this (he also had a part in the excellent Traitor, but one wonders if that was just an anomaly at this point). As Bison he acquits himself marginally better than Julia did in the first film and at least won’t have this remembered as his last film ever, but he’s saddled with an Irish accent that wavers in strength throughout the film and can’t make terrible lines like “Even milk has an expiration date” sound anything more than the cheap groaner it is. Robin Shou should be embarrassed of his performance as Gen, which is the worst in a career that has not exactly been compelling to date; he seems more stilted then he’s ever been and doesn’t know how to convey any real emotion. Michael Clarke Duncan is simply collecting a paycheck here as Balrog and makes no attempt to prove otherwise, mugging for the camera and doing that big, bad-ass villain laugh he does so well throughout. Moon Bloodgood, soon to be seen in Terminator: Salvation, handles herself the best by injecting some life into her largely pointless role, but she is playing opposite the absolute worst of the actors in Chris Klein, who gives the worst on-screen performance since Mathew Lillard in In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Klein looks goofy to start with, sporting what appears to be a teenager’s attempt to get a couple days worth of facial hair and a haircut reminiscent of Nicolas Cage’s in Next, as if to say “Hey everyone, I’m not the sensitive jock from American Pie!” Unfortunately he is that guy, and he spends most of his time in this film terribly overacting and trying way too hard to be a bad boy cop cliché who’s obsessed with his mission. When he tells Maya "This guy walks through the raindrops. Anybody that's against him is either dead, or on their way," he does it so earnestly, trying so hard to sound like a grizzled cop, that you feel bad laughing but can’t help doing it.

So we’ve got a bad script and bad acting. What is the last ingredient to make this a “so bad it’s good” classic? That would be the inept direction from Andrzej Bartkowiak. Bartkowiak has never been a great director; his past resume includes films like Doom, Exit Wounds and Cradle 2 The Grave. He’s known primarily as a cinematographer, and it shows as he has at least managed to make the movie look good at times. The streets of Bangkok are a nicely dirty place, and Bartkowiak and his cinematographer for the film Geoff Boyle manage to make it look proper for the most part. Unfortunately when it comes to providing any guidance for the film he falls down on the job, letting the various unnecessary plot devices take over the movie and failing to wring any cool factor out of the scenes. When Chun-Li attempts to take advantage of the lesbian proclivities one of Bison’s underlings, Bartkowiak stages what is quite possibly the least sexy dance scene between two women ever set to film. He stages the fight scenes fairly well, dropping the shaky-cam multiple-cut action that is so common, but even then the fights seem uninspired and generally subpar. When you are making a movie based on a fighting game and you can’t create any real excitement out of the fights, you know you have a very serious problem.

There are a whole host of other problems as well, including the sophomoric and uninspired score by Stephen Endelmen that Bartkowiak uses like a first-time director would in a horror film, the throwaway cameo of Vega that seems entirely pointless and included only to appease the video game fans, and a silly plot point with Bison that tries to draw parallels between him and Xiang. Everything is unexplored and left hanging, and the climax is one of those video game movie moments we all know so well, where the big video game attack move is going to be used, and…yeah, it just looks silly in the end. Much like the entire movie, the final fight is just ridiculous and painful to watch, knowing that yet another travesty has been made out of a classic and beloved video game.

The 411: Going into this film, I have to admit that I didn't expect too much; only that it be better then the atrocious 1994 Street Fighter film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and this actually makes that abomination look good by comparison. A half-thought out and overwrought script, terrible performances that are lowlighted by Chris Klein's laughable performance as a cop, and poor direction doom this film at every turn, making it unwatchable even as a low-rent "so bad it's good" style movie. In terms of video game films, which is not a tough category to top, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li ranks pretty low on the list. And that's quite a sad statement to make.

Final Score:  2.0   [ Very Bad ]