1154 - Review: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Topic: Black Hole Reviews
Oy... just oy...
Okay, I don't know where to start. Really. I just don't.
Contrary to what a lot of people may believe, I actually enjoyed the old Street Fighter flick with Van-Damme. Was it a great movie? Not necessarily, but it was still a fun little action movie with a dose of camp. At the very least, a number of the characters at least resemble their video game counterparts in some form or another.
This... this is just something else...
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. 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. That's it. 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.
Posted by dtm666
at 6:30 AM EDT