The first live-action feature film adaptation of the Street Fighter II arcade game (the one with Belgian star Jean-Claude Van-Damme playing the role of American soldier Guile) was a rather significant departure from the humble narrative of the source material. While a number of SF fans tend to dislike the movie because of its straying from its roots, I actually enjoyed the old Street Fighter flick. Was it a great movie? Not necessarily, but it was still a fun little action movie with a moderate dose of camp and cheese. At the very least, if nothing else, a number of the characters at least resemble their video game counterparts in some form or another.
But with 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li… this is something else entirely.
The Legend of Chun-Li is a basic, cookie-cutter martial arts action movie with a pretty typical plot (girl fights off drug syndicate in order to avenge her father’s… kidnapping – weak.) and your usual cookie-cutter action sequences common with kung-fu flicks these days. This is barely a Street Fighter movie – if you were to have changed the title, I probably would have thought it to be nothing more than another wire-fu movie that seems to be the norm with most Asian folks these days, but even at its most bare-bones level, it still manages to be lacking in many different things.
On a sidenote, some of the visual settings featured in the flick are, honestly, quite nice and gives you a nice feel of the cityscape. Sadly, most of the important stuff takes place at night, which really kills the beauty and splendor of many settings.
As a generic action movie, it’s a worthwhile moment if you simply turn your brain off. But as a movie based on a popular video game series, it’s severely lacking. Practically none of the characters taken from the game remotely resemble the source material and what personalities they do have seems very wooden and not the least bit awe-inspiring. Say what you will about the Van-Damme flick and the liberties it takes with the characters, but they at least attempted to do the characters justice, even if the results are hit and miss. Balrog the cameraman did have a boxing background, unlike the brute thug with a bazooka carrying the Balrog name… well, at least, you won’t have to change his name overseas because it’s not the boxer, it’s just some big guy.
Just about the only character they did manage to get right was Vega… and he only appears for a sliver of the movie and is easily defeated. Weak.
And most of all, there’s hardly any Street Fighter-esque fights involved – say what you will about the Van-Damme flick, but at least they were able to translate some moves to live-action celluiod – albeit poorly translated, but hey, they tried. Here, you only get a faintly-subtle Spinning Bird Kick and a fireball. The rest of the fights are generic wire-fu stuff that has been overdone to death. Weak.
Overall, this just seems like a disappointment for what is supposed to be a reboot of the Street Fighter movie franchise. It makes you wonder why they were bothering to make a movie based on the video game if it’s going to have nothing to do with the video game. If you really need your fix of live-action Street Fighter, I suggest tracking down the Van-Damme movie from the nineties instead… or even better, just go online and watch the Street Fighter: Later Years online show. Even that’s a better product than this.
AVOID.
dtm666 