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

Touches You

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Week 2: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Tomatometer score is 6%Here is the second week of this particular challenge and we have a doozy this week. The original live action Street Fighter with Jean Claude Van Damme was a fun albeit silly movie that at least tried to make the characters seem like the video game. It was a poorly done action film with terrible fighting scenes but it was fun. This on the other hand makes that movie look like an Oscar contender for best picture. This is nothing like the video game in any way whatsoever. Sure it has a person who calls themselves M. Bison but he's not that guy. He doesn't resemble that guy. Raul Julia even though he was battling cancer at the time still nailed that character in many different aspects. The actors are stiff and wooden in the worst way possible. The dialogue is cringe inducing. A robot clearly wrote this movie. They plugged this plot into an action script o matic 5000 and out popped this monstrosity. While the previous week's movie was bland and flat, this movie was actively trying to ruin any positive memories of Street Fighter. Stick with the animated movie. That's the only good one. Let's forget this nonsense ever happened. I give this movie an F.

When producers know that the 1994 movie completely flopped into nothing but an inside joke, they could have turned around and decided to make a serious movie that could have driven the Street Fighter game to new levels, but no, they crapped it all down the tubes. The sequencing is absolutely terrible, they start out with a narrative, and have a few good parts, but then the narrative just keeps going and the movie keeps bogging itself down with very poor wire-stunt work, and some of the worst acting I've ever seen. The "kungfu master" Gen, who is obviously a combined character of Ken and Ryu, has the most cliché dialog ever thought up to go along with his infinitely cliché role. The only really good performances I could find were from Michael Clark Duncan and Neal McDonough. Through out the movie, you could very easily predict what was going to happen several minutes before it actually did. All in all, another depressing look at one of my favorite childhood past-times, put into live action and carelessly flailed across the screen.

Here we have yet another movie that uses the Street Fighter name, yet has no idea who the individual characters are. Every one, with the exception of Barlog and Vega, were completely out of their " Street Fighter " character .This movie would have done much better if they dropped the Street Fighter name, and come up with something original.On it's own, it's an alright martial arts / revenge flick / action genre, nothing spectacular, but still an average B action movie ( better than most of Steven Seagal's movies ). The good points: Camera work was pretty good. Fight choreography was OK. Set design was good.The not so good points: The actors were trying, but their deliveries were awkward at times. There are a few plot holes that are never explained. The music at the club scene - WHY did they choose something that BAD? Decisions made by Chun-Li, no real life human would ever do. A lot of padding was used that slows the movie down to a snails pace. Overuse of wire " acrobatics " during combat ( along with pseudo Matrix sound effects thrown in ).If your in the mood for a generic action movie, and have nothing better to watch, this movie would be perfect for you.

Made 15 years after Jean Claude Van Damme donned a blue beret to star in the first live-action adaptation of the popular Capcom video game, I wonder if it'll be another 15 before they try again after this second failure.A melting pot of recycled ideas, not many of which have been taken from the Street Fighter universe, this may as well have been called Chun-Li Begins. The Legend of Chun-Li takes cues from Christopher Nolan's hit Batman reboot and the similarly back-to-basics Superman series Smallville, with Kristin Kreuk (a half-Chinese Canadian) taking the lead as Chun-Li.Ming-Na played the role in the 1994 Streetfighter (directed by Steven E. de Souza) and this version sees her taking centre stage. But that isn't the only thing that distinguishes the two films. Gone are the primary colours and theatrics and instead we have a "real world" story with a handful of fantasy elements. Shadaloo is no longer a place but the name of a criminal organisation, pronounced Shadal-ow. M. Bison isn't the elaborately dressed cartoon dictator fans are familiar with, instead he's smartly dressed gangster with an Irish accent. As befits a martial arts movie, this is a revenge tale but there's a lot of other stuff going on too. Whole sub-plots that serve no purpose. The Legend of Chun-Li doesn't remind you of the Street Fighter game but it does remind you of a lot of other movies. Not only the aforementioned superhero adventures either. Every scene or plot point gives you a feeling of deja-vu. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak even rips off a memorable scene from one of his own movies (Romeo Must Die, 2000). Several moments (especially the ending) imitate Batman Begins but the results are similar to Catwoman (Pitof, 2004).Tipping its hat to video game predecessors by featuring Robin Shou, this is a curious failure, the whole thing feels more like a TV pilot or a B-movie than the major motion picture it's supposed to be.