Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li (Theaters)

Let’s be honest, when we all heard a Street Fighter movie was being made back in the 90’s, gamers everywhere, myself included, rejoiced at the thought of Ryu and Ken shooting fireballs from their hands.   Or even M. Bison dishing out some psycho power.  Instead, we got the Muscles from Brussels as the American Guile,  a short Sagat played by an actor known for his Native American roots, a not-so-pretty Vega and Damian Chapa as Ken Masters?!  

The horrible dialogue and terrible fight sequences didn’t help the poor casting choice as it set the tone for future game-to-film flops.  You would think director Andrzej Bartkowiak at least saw the first film and did everything in his power to do the opposite.  That’s exactly what he did.  What did we get?  An even worse Street Fighter.  While the first film relied heavily on cramming in as much SF characters as possible, Bartkowiak took the discreet route by having only six characters in his film: Chun Li (Kristin Kreuk), M. Bison (Neil McDonaugh), Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan), Charlie Nash (Chris Klein), Vega (Taboo of Black Eye Peas) and Gen (Robin Shou). 

Where the first film failed in character development due to the high number of SF characters, so did Bartkowiak’s six with the exception of it’s title character Chun Li.  Vega gets the worst of it as he’s only onscreen for a total of ten minutes! 

Maybe it’s due to Taboo’s lack of acting experience, but it was certainly better than Chris Klein’s Nash who was absolutely horrible whenever onscreen and was definitely the laughing stock of the crew.  The feared M. Bison has been reduced to a greedy businessman with a bad Irish accent instead of a General.  And Balrog?  He’s more of a bitch messenger boy than a boxer.  Gen and Chun Li were the only ones who seemed to fit the SF world on the silver screen, more so the latter. 

While the film tries to take the more realistic approach, Bartkowiak implemented Chun Li’s fireball anyway.  Which made me wonder why he couldn’t make Bison do his Psycho Crusher.  The film’s ” serious ” tone is marred by the humorless one-liners dished out by Nash and the constant tiger roar whenever Bison entered had me shaking my head.  The only good this film does is remind males how naturally beautiful Kristin Kreuk is.  That’s it.

In closing, SF: Legend of Chun Li is plain bad.  While, the first film retained some memorable lines like ” It’s the collection agency Bison. Your ass is six months overdue, and it’s mine ”, SF: LoCL can’t produce a single moment of remember when.  In fact, I appreciate the JCVD version more now.  You’re better off watching the first and poking fun at it than wasting 90 minutes of your life on this one.