Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Those of you with good memories will recall that this is not the first attempt to bring the Street Fighter video games to the big screen. There was another film in 1994 with Jean-Claude Van Damme and the late Raul Julia in his final role. That wasn't a very good movie, either. It was noisy, campy, and cheesy as all get-out. But at least it seemed to be trying and had a vision, misguided as it was. This movie in comparison is drab, grimy, murky, and not very fun at all. It's almost as if director Andrzej Bartkowiak was under strict orders from the studio to remove anything that could be remotely fun or exciting. Mr. Bartkowiak is no stranger to butchered video game to film adaptations, having brought us 2005's cinematic take on Doom. With a title like Street Fighter, we at least expect some fast-paced action. And with Chun-Li as its central focus, we at least expect some sexy fun. (In the video game world, she ranks right up there with Ms. Pac-Man and Lara Croft amongst the "first ladies" of gaming.) But the fighting (on the streets or otherwise) is unimpressive, with many battles ending mere seconds after they start. As for the title heroine, she's been turned from a sexy and fun martial artist, into a brooding Batman-like vigilante who spends more time talking to us in a droning and endless off-camera narration than she does kicking butts.
Through her narration, we learn that she was a child born into wealth. Her loving parents hoped she would become a concert pianist. Then, one night, the villain Bison (Neal McDonough) and his men broke into her family's home and kidnapped her father. Bison, we learn, is a crime lord who is so evil, he doesn't have anything good left remaining within him. He somehow transferred everything good within him into the body of his at-the-time unborn daughter through an ancient ceremony. He then proceeded to kill his wife and rip his child right out of her stomach. For reasons that are unexplained by the movie, the daughter somehow went missing, and he's now searching for her. He also plans to use his wealth as a businessman to buy up all his rivals, take control of a slum area in Thailand, and destroy it so that he can build a new community. Bison was apparently born and raised on the streets of Thailand, which makes his weak Irish accent that comes and goes throughout his dialogue all the more mysterious.
Chun-Li, meanwhile, has grown up to be a young woman played by Kristin Kreuk from TV's Smallville. In the early moments, she seems content to live out her childhood dreams of being a pianist, but then an ancient scroll is delivered to her, and she has a feeling "it means something". Her mother conveniently dies of Cancer shortly thereafter, so the young girl has the opportunity to leave her world behind and live as a homeless person on the streets of Thailand, seeking the aid of a mysterious martial arts master named Gen (Robin Shou). While on the streets, she sees the suffering of the poor people, and it gives her another reason to fight against Bison. She decides to become a Robin Hood-like figure, robbing from Bison to give to the poor. Also after Bison are a pair of police detectives, played by a terribly miscast Chris Klein and Moon Bloodgood. Klein manages to mangle every line of dialogue the hacked-out screenplay gives him, while Bloodgood exists simply to break the record for the most amount of leather clothing worn by a single woman in a film.
The performances as a whole all but guarantee this movie could sweep the acting nominations when it comes to next year's Razzie Awards. They would be merely bad individually, but the fact that no one in this movie seems to be working on the same page makes them excruciating. As the heroine, Kreuk seems to think she's in a bad rip off of Kill Bill. McDonough's turn as the head villain comes across as the most boring Bond villain ever put to film. Meanwhile, Michael Clarke Duncan (as Bison's right-hand man, Balrog) reads his dialogue as if he's under the impression his character is supposed to be mentally slow. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li fails by just about every lowered expectation you may have. It's not exciting, it takes itself way too seriously, and the plot often doesn't make a lick of sense. In one scene, we're introduced to one of Bison's followers - a woman negotiating a business deal for her boss. The next time we see her, she's at a nightclub, and Chun Li decides to lure her in by pretending to hit on her on the dance floor. How did she know the woman was a lesbian? The only other scene we saw her in didn't provide us any clues, and our heroine has spent no time around her. Maybe it was a lucky guess?
There's a lot of things this movie doesn't explain. We know that this wise old martial arts master training Chun-Li used to be a criminal who worked for Bison, but why does he have magic powers? (When she takes a bullet protecting a kid, he heals her and causes her wound to magically mend itself in seconds.) For that matter, how did he survive being stuck in his house when it's blown up with a rocket launcher? Why are Bison's soldiers so heavily armed with machine guns if they hardly ever use them? Their strategy mainly seems to stand around and wait for Chun-Li to show up and kick them, which makes me wonder how they managed to become such a feared army in the first place. Why is it after spending weeks on the streets and sleeping in trash-strewn alleys and gutters that Chun-Li's clothes are just tattered slightly, but her hair and skin are flawless? Why does the movie even try to build up our expectations by introducing a villain named Vega (played by Taboo, from the music group Black Eyed Peas), only to have him exit the movie in the very next scene in a fight that lasts all of 15 seconds?
See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home