Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

"This movie walks through the raindrops."

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak
Written by Justin Marks
Starring Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neal McDonough, Robin Shou, Moon Bloodgood, Josie Ho, Taboo and Michael Clarke Duncan

Expectations can be a dangerous beast. Good buzz and fevered anticipation are craved above all else by advertisers and marketing men, particularly when dealing with a fan-favourite property, but all too often it is these expectations that can be a film's worst enemy. Nothing prompts more despair than shattered hopes, and the pain of seeing something turn out badly is often as nothing compared to the feeling of loss over what might have been.

In case you haven't guessed, none of this preamble is even remotely relevant to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. As a Hollywood videogame adaptation, this film crawled into cinemas early in 2009 with precisely one hopeful objective; to better the horrendous Jean-Claude Van Damme Street Fighter movie that was vomited onto our collective faces in 1994. That The Legend of Chun-Li manages to fail to reach even that meagre target is at once astonishing and deeply hilarious.

As the title suggests, this  latest big screen effort chooses to focus around Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk), a young Chinese girl whose businessman father is kidnapped by the ruthless property magnate M. Bison (Neal McDonough). Once she is fully grown, she embarks on a mission to Bison's home city of Bangkok, becoming intertwined with an Interpol investigation and a mysterious martial arts sect as she looks to find Bison and exact her revenge.

All things considered, this is not an unsalvageably awful premise for a martial arts film. Fans gnashed their teeth at the decision to forego the iconic brooding warrior Ryu in favour of the high-kicking Chinese girl, but Chun-Li 's story presents a clear, accessible arc which can quite easily be launched into with little preamble, introducing new characters and other elements of the universe along the way. Compared to the idiotic, formless gang's-all-here approach taken by Van Damme and co, this can be said to be the one creative call the film gets right.

However, what might have been an interesting cinematic reinterpretation of a cherished videogame quickly mutates into something much more bizarre. It's clear that there was some misguided desire here to deliver a more "realistic" take on Street Fighter, but what has ultimately resulted is a movie that bears no resemblance at all to the game on which it's based. The film contains no street fighting, for one thing, and many of the action scenes involve guns. Very few of the series's characters are included, while those that do make it are largely unrecognisable. Any vestiges of the game's colourful personality have been ruthlessly strangled, replaced with a po-faced approximation of production-line Hollywood Grit™.

On this basis, you'd expect the film to be stultifying dull, but happily, this is a film that fails to achieve its goals so spectacularly that it frequently lapses into self-parody, with the efforts of the cast playing a key role. In this respect, leading lady Kristin Kreuk sets the bar high; she appears to have a selection of around five fixed facial expressions, suffering tremendous pain when forced to switch between them. She also has very little presence, meaning that it's difficult to remember that she's in the film when she isn't on screen, and often when she is.

Kreuk's shortcomings are not compensated for by the supporting cast. Neal McDonough, reinterpreting demonic dictator M. Bison as a softly-spoken suit-wearing Irishman, seems under the impression that going a bit glassy-eyed conveys ultimate evil (it doesn't), Michael Clarke Duncan talks in his deepest voice and grunts a bit as Balrog, while Robin Shou (martial arts master Gen) and Moon Bloodgood (generic sexy detective) do very little with two of the least engaging central characters ever committed to film.

Top marks, however, must surely be awarded to American Pie's Chris Klein, playing Interpol agent Charlie Nash as the bastard offspring of Robert Downey Jr, Nicolas Cage and possibly Joey from Friends. It's never quite clear what Klein believes himself to be conveying here; my guess is that the actor saw how popular Downey Jr became after playing Iron Man as a bit of a douche, and resolved to make Nash even more awesome by portraying him as an even bigger tool. Whatever the case, Klein's acting here is so absurd and screen-eating in its nostril-flaring insanity that it elevates the whole film to the level of sublime farce, and is easily worth the price of admission on its own.

This ineptitude is reflected through every level of the film. The screenplay, by Justin Marks, plays out like Batman Begins as written by a six-year-old, attempting to hit many of the same notes but constantly running face-first into lines like "I stood when standing was not easy" and "This guy walks through the raindrops". The film even attempts to close off with a Begins-style sequel teaser which comes across as less of a sly tip of the hat and more as a bumbling punch in the face. The fact that Marks is currently attached to write scripts for beloved geek properties such as Voltron and Shadow of the Colossus will undoubtedly be giving many fanboys sleepless nights.

Speaking of repeat offenders, Romeo Must Die helmer Andrzej Bartkowiak has not only learned nothing from the creative disappointment of the cinematic Doom adaptation, but has seemingly forgotten a number of things he used to know. Most of the fight scenes presented here are horrifyingly average, with those that stand out doing so only for their awfulness. The 60-second fight involving Vega (Taboo, of the Black-Eyed Peas) is a case in point, adding nothing other than to make the fearsome masked warrior appear an utter joke. Worse still, the action involves almost no moves from the actual games, while the few that make it through are rendered using special effects worthy of MS Paint. Chun-Li's famous Spinning Bird Kick, in particular, is a show-stopper for all the wrong reasons.

There is literally no end to the list of things wrong with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. This is a film that fails to hit every single mark it aims for, to the extent that watching it as a straight comedy is the only way to process it without going insane. I'm not personally convinced that this is a franchise that necessarily has a great movie in it - even the best effort so far, 1994's Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, was something of a mess outside of its gorgeous fight scenes - but by God, it can surely do better than this. Not that it seems like Hollywood would be willing to give the series another go around; two critical and commercial failures are likely to be enough to convince producers not to drop any more coins into this particular machine. Watching The Legend of Chun-Li, you'd have to say they're right to save their quarters.

2/10