Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

PLOT:

The movie opens with Chun Li narrating her experience growing up aspiring to be a concert pianist. As a child, she moves from San Francisco to Hong Kong with her family. There, along with piano, she learns Wushu from her father, Xiang, who is a well connected businessman. One night, her home is attacked by Bison and his henchman. Chun Li’s father fights them off until Balrog grabs a hold of a young Chun Li, forcing him to surrender. As Bison and his men are leaving with Xiang, Chun Li’s mother tries to stop them. Balrog just punches her.

Years later, Chun Li grows up and becomes a talented concert pianist. At the end of one of her concerts, she receives a scroll written in Ancient Chinese text. On her way home, she sees a mysterious homeless man getting assaulted by street thugs. After the thugs leave, Chun Li tends to him and notices a spiderweb tattoo on his hand. Meanwhile, Xiang is shown working for Bison as a prisoner. In return for his services, he is allowed to view pictures of his daughter all grown up. Back home, Chun Li’s mother finally loses her battle to cancer as Chun Li and her servants mourn her loss at a funeral.

Elsewhere, we see Nash and Maya investigating a murder of several heads of criminal syndicate families in Bangkok. Chun Li on the side is meeting with a wise old lady in town who studies the scroll and tells her to either find a man named Gen in Bangkok, revealing to her an image of the same spiderweb she saw tattooed on the homeless man’s hand. With a new goal in mind, Chun Li leaves her home and heads to Bangkok. After days of searching for Gen without any luck, she sees a man being assaulted in an alley by thugs. Chun Li comes to his rescue and fights them. After a long battle ended by finishing them with a Bike Rack Drop Ultra move, Chun Li collapses in exhaustion. There, we see Gen pick her up to take her to his home.

Gen tells Chun Li that he knows how to find her father and that Bison has him, but that she also needs anger management. In response, she goes to an internet cafe to find out more about Bison, who is now holding the families of property owners hostage in order to force them to sign their property over to him. Upon leaving, one of the owners is asked to hand over the rights to a docking harbor, allowing the shipment of the “White Rose”. Chun Li overhears this. Meanwhile at Interpol, Nash figures out that Bison’s headquarters are right across the street from the Police Station.

Later that night, Cantana, one of Bison’s secretaries, goes to a nightclub. Chun Li spies on her and notices her eyeing the girls in the club. Chun Li moves in and seductively dances with her before casually walking away into the bathroom. Cantana follows her and locks the bathroom door. Chun Li beats Cantana until Cantana reveals the location of the White Rose. Cantana’s bodyguards come back and Chun Li escapes after fighting them off.

We are then told of Bison’s origins. He is the son of Irish missionaries. He grew up an orphan having to steal fish from people in Thailand. In order to lose his conscience, he forced his daughter out of the womb of his wife prematurely. This transferred his conscience into her, thus Bison no longer had/has a conscience. Back at Gen’s home, Bison’s henchmen come after Gen and Chun Li. Gen fights them off until Balrog blows up his house with a RPG. With Gen gone and nowhere to be found, Chun Li runs off. She is then attacked by Vega, who she defeats soundly and hangs upside down over the side of a building.

Chun Li then heads to the harbor and interrogates an employee into telling her the arrival time of the White Rose. Later that night, this turns out to be a trap as several Shadaloo soldiers capture her. Chun Li is then taken back to Shadaloo headquarters and is reunited with her father. Bison tells her that Xiang outlived his usefulness and breaks his neck, killing him. Bison and Balrog leave Chun Li to the henchman to finish off. Chun Li however escapes when they try to swing her around from the ceiling like a pinata. As she runs away, she is shot in the waist by Balrog. Before Balrog could recapture her, the crowd begins throwing durians at him. This scares Balrog as he drives off in his Mercedes-Benz. Chun Li meanwhile, is rescued again by Gen, who narrowly escaped death and survived the explosion in his house.

Chun Li approaches Nash and tells him she needs backup to take down Bison. Nash and Maya oblige as Chun Li approaches the dock employee who set her up last time. The employee tells her that he was forced into deceiving her and tells her the real arrival time. Chun Li doubts him at first, but he points to the white board at the arrival time, proving that it is true. At the dock later that night, Interpol agents engage in a shootout with Shadaloo soldiers. On a ship, Chun Li finds a girl asking where her father is. Meanwhile, Gen fights Balrog and kills him by stabbing him with a pipe spraying nitrogen. We later find out that the girl is Bison’s daughter and her name is Rose, making her the White Rose. Bison takes her in and welcomes her warmly.

Bison walks into his office where he is ambushed by Gen. Gen however is no match for him. Sensing his daughter in danger, Bison goes back to his daughters room, where he finds she is gone. Gen shows up again and ambushes Bison, getting beaten up again. Chun Li then comes in and fights Bison. After a long battle, she hits him with a bamboo pole and drops sandbags on him, startling him and making him unaware of what is going on. She then charges up a Kikoken and shoots it at him, knocking him off the scaffolding they were fighting on, then jumping on his head and twisting it all the way around, breaking his neck and killing him.

Back home, Chun Li is settled down as Gen pays her a visit. He shows her an ad for a Street Fighter tournament, telling her about a Japanese fighter named Ryu. Chun Li declines, saying that she’s home for now.

REVIEW:

I’ve always been a fan of the Street Fighter game. I haven’t bothered to watch the original film that came out back i nthe late 80s, though, I will soon enough. It can’t be any worse than this. There is a reason this was released when it was and not during a time when it could really make some bucks.

When I heard they were thining of doing films on the characters from Street Fighter, I was excited. As with many video game characters, each has a very interesting backstory. The problem is getting that story to translate well onto the big screen and getting the right people for the parts. Chun-Li is an interesting character, although, for me I can count on one hand how many time I’ve beaten her. Still, I wouldn’t have picked her to be first, I’d have gone with M.Bison, Ryu, Guille, or someone of that caliber. Still, the story is not this film’s downfall, but rather the atrocious acting from two of the leads.

Kristin Kreuk, who apparently is from Smallville, somehow won the role of Chun-Li. Good for her for winning the part and all, but I would have given it to a more Asian actress, such as Maggie Q, Kelly Hu, etc. That’s just me, though. Kreuk is very wooden and unbelievable as Chun-Li. For someone who loses her mother and dad is missing, you’d think there’s have been some emotion going on, but nothing. Even after she is reunited with and watches her dad get killed, there is little to no emotional depth to her. The narration was even worse. If I wanted to hear monotone speaking, I’d listen to Ben Stein. Kreuk just made this film painful for me.

Another bad acting performance comes from Chris Klein. Look, this guy has come along way in his career, but someone needs to advise him to take better roles. Now, he may be a fan of the game, so taking this one may have just been because of those feelings. Klein, though, has to give his worse performance on screen I’ve ever seen from him. I’ve seen better acting from elementary school theater productions. Not to mention his character seems to be just thrown in there to throw some sort of subplot into this already convoluted movie…I’ll get to that in a bit.

Not all the acting was bad, though. Neal McDonough steals the show as M.Bison. He makes this thing watchable, that’s for sure. On top of that, his accent seems authentic, even if I can’t place where it is exactly he’s supposed to be from.

Robin Shou has a bit of an ironic role here. You may remember in Mortal Kombat, as Liu Kang, he was a bit of a rebellious “chosen one”. Here, he’s on the other side of that coin. His role as Gen has him teaching Chun-Li various fighting techniques and whatnot to survive. I found a bit of humor in that. Like klein, he appears to be a lot smaller than he was in the role we know him best for, but his talent (acting and martial arts) has not dwindled at all.

Moon Bloodgood is a nice piece of eye candy for those of us that are not really attracted to Kristin Kreuk. Her role, though, isn’t that big, and actually involves that convoluted subplot that really doesn’t need to be in this thing. Come to think of it, she might have made a good Chun-Li.

Michel Clarke Duncan fits Balrog to a ‘T’ and Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas shows up as Vega. Both characters though seem to be thrown in just to let the viewers have some characters from the game.

This film has too much potential to be this bad. Everything is in place for it to succeed, except two things. The afforestation bad acting and the convoluted subplot involving Interpol and trying to catch M.Bison’s crime syndicate. Now, I understand they had to stick something in there to play up the bad guy role of Bison and all, but this just felt tacked on and pointless. Also, they spent way too much time on the early years of Chun-Li. Obviously, this is an origin story, but people aren’t watching it to see drama and a little girl hanging on her dad for 30 minutes. We want some action, and there just wasn’t enough in it for me.

Video games just don’t make good movies 90% of the time. There are a few exceptions. Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that the same could have been said for comic book movies. All it takes is the right one to catch on. Unfortunately, this is not it, and may very well be the first and last of the origin films. I haven’t heard of any more in the works. As you can tell, I’m not fan of this picture, and kind of knew it wasn’t going to be any good before I even popped it in the DVD player, but I still watched it anyway, hoping I would be wrong. As I always say, you should watch and make your own decision, you’ve just read my opinion,

2 out of 5 stars

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