Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

The second official live action film based on the Street Fighter video games is possibly the most mediocre action film  I have ever seen.

That said, I will buy it on blu-ray just for the awesomeness of Balrog.

There’s an awful lot wrong with this film from a Street Fighter fan’s point of view but as a stand alone film it’s not bad, just average, from the competant but not great fights to the glory of Balrog and an RPG which really sums up a lot about this film, it shouldn’t really have been called Street Fighter at all really.

Of course there’s also the question, how does it compare to the original live action film?

Well, Balrog aside, the casting and costume design is this is ABYSMAL. Epic fail doesn’t even cover how wrong Bison is…From bleach blonde hair to generic business suit instead of trademark Bison red outfit.  Oddly they then gave Charlie Nash black hair not blonde…

At no point does Kristin Kreuk wear an outfit you’d associate with Chun Li. Of course it doesn’t help that she is hardly of the correct background to play a Chinese girl… A shame as she is hot in her own right but not as Chun Li, wrong figure and doesn’t look good when kicking ass.

Gen is played by Robin Shou, who played Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat and he does a great job not only in the fights but also as Chun Li’s mentor but couldn’t look less like Gen if he tried.

So in terms of outfits, although they looked poor in the original, at least they were reasonably accurate.

Story

At the start of this I thought someone’s got Chun Li mixed up with Helena from DOA, she starts of as a young piano player which puts it closer to DOA than the DOA film even… Anyway,  in this her dad is kidnapped in front of a young Chun Li not killed.  Here I’d like to mention that before he was kidnapped, Chun Li’s father kicked ass and was seriously awesome until they use Chun Li as a hostage on him.

Chun Li knows she wants to go after Bison but doesn’t know how to until intervention from Gen’s group helps her.  With Gen’s training she learns her ki attack and then she goes Double Dragon on Bison’s henchwoman and Shadaloo minions and even Vega.  She then falls into a trap and finally gets to watch her dad die a weak death that doesn’t seem to cause any emotion at all and then she makes short work of her captors to escape.

Throughout the film, Charlie Nash is a step behind Bison and he is working in Chun Li’s official role – interpol… He has a female sidekick who is useless eyecandy. Eventually Chun Li tracks him down rather than the other way round and she gets Interpol to back her and Gen up.

Gen fights Balrog and then Bison leading to the finale with Chun Li fighting the man who killed her father but doesn’t have any good lines to say about it.

Seeing how Chun Li was a reporter in the old film it’s hard to say it stuck to people’s story either, we’ll call this a fail on both films as while undercover reporter is much closer than vigilante. The original film had Charlie turn into Blanka, guess the makers never completed SFII as Blanka eh Jimmy!

Is that all the characters?

SF: TLOFCL purposefully uses a much smaller subset of the SF roster compared to the over ambitious original and changes things needlessly, seriously there are loads of films are out there where a cop is after someone that killed a family member, so why change Chun Li’s story? It also mean creating new characters like Charlie’s partner – needless.

Cammy, didn’t make the film but the film makers merged Cammy’s moveset into Chun Li’s anyway so we still get to see a frankensteiner but it’s just not as sexy as when Cammy does it.

Vega is fine, not as much of a blood thirsty monster as the anime but to compare either film to that is like comparing the Death Star to a supersoaker.

Balrog is the star of this movie, stealing every scene he’s in. He isn’t in costume but I certainly brought into him as a powerful and very bad man who enjoys his work.

Bison just can’t get close to the late Raul Julia, to be fair, the script wouldn’t let him and he was believably evil enough, just lacked the scenes to show how evil he is.

Rose was tacked in near the end, a rare case of one-upping the original film. She does nothing but prove a distraction though.

Umm that’s it, Chun Li, Gen, Charlie, Balrog, Vega, Rose and Bison is all they could manage to fit in and they still butchered half of their character histories.

It’s not all bad though

BUT from a film point of view, the characters worked within the realms of their stories, it didn’t drag on, wasn’t obscenely idiotic like Revenge of the Fallen and the fights were far better than Dragonball Evo. This film deserved better treatment than it’s had in my opinion.

As for it’s standings in the Video game movie adaptations, just like the film, somewhere in the middle.  It’s not an abomination like Mario, better than Double Dragon but it’s not a patch on Mortal Kombat or the shameless joy of DOA. If it wasn’t for Bison it would probably be a lot harder to pick between this and the original but thankfully Raul Julia gave us gems like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B8rlonf0NQ

That’s how you put across how evil he is.