DVD Clinic

Awfully Good #87
August 5, 2009

Comments: 3

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Strike Back Below!

Source: DVD Clinic

By: Jason Adams

To prepare yourself for this week’s column, be sure to check out the Awfully Good take on the first STREET FIGHTER movie.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (2009)

Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Stars: Kristen Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neal McDonough

Is there a plot?

A concert pianist gets an old map in the mail, abandons her wealthy life and heads to Thailand to beat up the evil real estate tycoon who kidnapped her father.

What's the damage?

No matter how the new STREET FIGHTER movie turned out, one thing was for certain…it had to be better than the 1994 version. It just had to. Right? I’m pretty sure I could give a camera to a monkey with a learning disability on a crack binge and it could make a better movie than the Steven E. de Souza nightmare that killed Raul Julia. Well, now I have watched STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN LI and there’s only one thing to say: holy crap. Jean Claude Van Damme must’ve financed this movie himself, just so he wouldn’t be in the worst Street Fighter movie anymore.

If GREEN MILE had been set in a more realistic prison, I assume we would’ve seen Michael Clark Duncan make this face a lot more.

THE LEGEND OF CHUN LI gets it all wrong. At least the first one is bad in a goofy fun kind of way. Writer Justin Marks, who inexplicably continues to get big name work, sets up this version as a serious drama. It’s like he was embarrassed to be writing a STREET FIGHTER movie, so he wrote a super generic crime story and just named all the people after SF characters. Aside from Vega’s mask and a random and unnecessary Hadouken fireball, this is not a Street Fighter movie. It’s just a bad movie.

My mind may be in the gutter, but isn’t that a big white dildo on the table?

How bad, you say? It’s even able to beat the previous movie in WTF?! casting. Let’s take a look:

Kristen Kreuk as Chun Li: What exactly is legendary about her? Chun Li wanders around the movie having no idea what’s going on. The only reason she gets anything done is her mystical kung fu guide that pretty much does all the work for her. The only thing Chun Li seems to be good at is providing absolutely horrible narration worse than most Engrish video game translations. Golden nuggets like “Was this mysterious ancient scroll I got in the mail a message? I had to find out!” or “I had to forget everything I ever knew. I had to become one with the people of Bangkok! I was getting farther and farther away from who I ever was.” Moments later she has a little dirt on her face and she’s griping about how difficult it was living on the streets. And keep in mind they never explain why exactly she had to live on the streets.

[SPOILERS] And at the end, our heroine gruesomely murders Bison in front of his innocent young daughter, which is ironically worse than anything Bison ever did to Chun Li. The poor girl literally arrives after having not seen her dad for years, and then watches some random Asian chick reenact THE EXORCIST on his neck.

“This is my Keanu Reeves face. Look!”

Chris Klein as Charlie Nash: Nash is easily the all-star of the movie and Klein is the only person who understands what kind of movie he should be in. He relishes every bad line, overacts with reckless abandon and sneers with manic glee despite being a good guy. Every time he yelled “NASH OUT!” I got all warm and fuzzy inside. Klein’s the film’s saving grace, but his and Moon Bloodgood’s cop characters are completely unnecessary. They serve absolutely nothing to the story except as back up for Chun Li at the very end. But I still hope the guy gets his own spinoff. Check out the Best Parts section for video evidence.

Neal McDonough as M. Bison: You can slow that spin in your grave, Mr. Julia. M. Bison in this movie is a sissy businessman who uses women as punching bags and whines about his childhood of being the only white guy in Thailand. That completely explains why his evil plot is to buy up as much Thai land as possible. Scary! My favorite part: The movie was half over before I realized McDonough was trying to speak in an Irish accent as Bison, which makes no sense considering the character’s Irish parents died when he was a baby and he was raised by Thai people. My second favorite part: The bizarre flashback that features Bison mystically “ridding himself of his conscience” by ripping open his pregnant wife’s womb and transferring his evil to his unborn daughter. Why does he do this? To be mean without feeling bad? I don’t know. Then for some reason the end of the movie is about Bison trying to get back his daughter because she’s his only weakness. Apparently he couldn't remember where he put her.

Truly a despicable villain, M. Bison enjoyed making his victims uncomfortable by gently massaging their faces.

Robin Shou as Gen: You may remember Shou as the guy who played Liu Kang in the MORTAL KOMBAT movie. Well, now he’s sucked in two video game franchises. Shou may be a decent martial artist, but he’s just a god awful actor. Like “I can’t believe they kept some of his line readings in this movie” bad. I had a hunch his “mysterious” mentor character was only ~~stalking~~ helping Chun Li so that he could bang her, which was confirmed in the random scene where he gives her a bath in the streets.

Taboo as Vega: The guy from the Black Eyed Peas as Vega??? Out of all the people in the world, you chose someone responsible for “My Humps”? Thankfully he’s only in the movie for one scene, playing a badass unbeatable fighter who gets his ass kicked by a 100 pound girl in thirty seconds.

Through hard work, meditation and buying Lindsay Lohan’s easy to follow guide, you too can possess the power of Firecrotch.
There’s plenty more wrong with this movie that I could rant about (sorry Michael Clarke Duncan), but if you’re looking for some punishment I suggest watching it for yourself.