Destructoid review: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

8:00 PM on 02.27.2009   |   Brad Rice

55 comments

It's been 14 years since the last Street Fighter film. Ample time has been given for the series to be forgotten by the general populace, and replaced with some rather violent (and awesome) anime.

So, I got up at 9:30 this morning in order to watch the film and get this review out, just for y'all. There was only one other person in the theatre -- and I was surprised at even that.

You all know what The Legend of Chun-Li is about -- it's setting up the backstory for some of the inevitable sequels that will come out of this, after the success of the Resident Evil series. Let's just get into the review, shall we?

Street Figther: The Legend of Chun-Li
Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak
Written by Justin Marks
Released on February 27, 2009

I hate to spoil all the fun of reading the review now, but Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is not the abortion of a film that you were hoping for it to be. But stick with the review, there's some interesting things I have to say about it!

As the title suggests, the film tells Chun-Li's origin story, about how M. Bison kidnapped her father when she was young, and her quest to find him. At the same time, once Chun-Li moves to Bangkok in order to find our good friend MB, the Bangkok police, along with Interpol, are making an attempt at finally capturing the man. Naturally, these two storylines will end up meeting.

As we follow Chun-Li, who is played by Kristin Kreuk, she finds herself a trainer in Bangkok in Gen, who is played by Robin Shou -- the guy who played Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat. Small world, eh? Besides Chun-Li, M. Bison, and Gen, Vega and Balrog are the other two Street Fighter characters who make on-screen appearances.

Chun-Li's origin story is pretty good, albeit a bit typical for this type of action movie, but what ends up bringing the story down are two things. First, is the B-story of the Bangkok police and Interpol trying to track down Bison. These scenes have dialogue that's packed with cheesy and inane flirting, along with Chris Klein's poor acting skills. Second, when following Chun-Li, way too much of her story is told through voice-over. That's a clear sign that the writer couldn't think of a decent way to get these ideas out, and so just took the easy way out.

One of the things that I was really happy about with this film was that the fight scenes came out really well, apart from the times when they used wire-fighting, as the fight scenes come off as fairly realistic, and they pull off some of Chun-Li's moves without any grandeur or over-the-top flourish -- namely the Bicycle and Spinning Bird kicks. When they decide to bring CG into the mix, then things start to get a little cheesy.

One of my biggest disappointments was the characters within the film. I'm not talking solely about the acting, which was a problem, but also about character motivations and backstory.

With the acting, many times the actors would either over-stress or under-stress their accents, making some of the dialogue come out as overly-stilted, while characters who have spent all their lives in Bangkok or China will have perfectly Western accents (Bison is Irish!). Also, the film uses local languages (Thai and Chinese) really sporadically and without attention to detail. If Chun-Li and her father always spoke Chinese to each other when they were younger, why is she suddenly speaking English to him as an adult?

Bison was a really big disappointment in the film. Neal McDonough does a good job playing as him, but he just didn't play him as evil as he could have been. It was partly because they gave Bison too much backstory, and simply didn't give him ample time to explore his personality. Ultimately, he was a fairly flat character and any attempts to turn him into something more were really heavy-handed.

Ultimately, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a nice attempt at rebooting the Street Fighter franchise. It's certainly not a very good film -- it's mediocre at best -- but it is one of the better videogame movies out there, right up there with Silent Hill. 

If you decide to go to see this, be aware that you'll be getting a fairly shoddy plot, but they manage to get the action scenes done right. There is potential within the franchise for it to actually turn into something really well-done. My suggestion? Dump the writer and try to hold back on the wire-fighting.

Score – 6.0  (Decent. Slightly above average, maybe a little niche. But we wouldn't recommend it to everybody.)

Final score: