Live Action Anime

WARNING: Contains Spoilers

As much as I wanted this movie to be a success, I’m afraid it won’t be.  Not that I ever thought that Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li was going to be the greatest movie of the year, but I was hoping it would just be a nice enjoyable fantasy/martial arts/action flick.   I had hoped it would pull in enough box office to make a certain other Street Fighter movie.  Unfortunately after watching this film, that may not happen.

I’m not much for writing super indepth film reviews.  I don’t like reading them and I don’t like writing them.   But I feel obligated to since I report on it and have spoken on it here at Live Action Anime. So what I’m going to do is just give a good overview of what I thought about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.  I’ll leave the in depth reviews for this site to Thrash Til Death.  I’m sure he’ll have lots to say if they ever release it over there.  And I’ll talk about this more on an upcoming podcast.

It’s a bit amusing to me how the two Street Fighter movies are both equivalently bad but on opposite ends of the ‘bad spectrum’ (If that’s not a phrase then I’m creating it now).  Both films are bad representations of the popular styles of entertainment of the time.  Let me explain that a bit more.

In 1994, when the original Street Fighter released, everything in the mainstream, for the most part, was more big and bright.  Movies, cartoons, clothing styles, hair, etc.  It was the 90s.  People were more laid back and care free then.  A Street Fighter movie gets made and it looks pretty much like the game from a visual standpoint.  The costumes are all bright colors and nearly picture perfect.  Even though the movie pretty much sucked, it was sometimes fun to watch because it was corny.  However, the story in the movie really didn’t follow the game at all.  On top of that it just plain sucked (did I mention that?).  So Street Fighter fans were disappointed.

Flash forward to 2009.  In this day and age people aren’t nearly as laid back, in fact most people are pretty up tight.  More than 1/2 the people that have an internet connection are miserable.  I’m guessing I’ll get some people that will complain in the comments section.  But hey, that’s what it’s there for!  Anyway, things these days are pretty serious.  And if you look at movie adaptations in the last few years it reflects that.  Everything’s darker. Everyone seems to have to wear black.  Must be dark!  If it’s not dark, it won’t work!!!  And Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li followed this same set of thinking in it’s design.  For instance Bison, a character that’s identifiable with his red coat, has no red coat in the movie at all.  Vega trades in his white mask and normally more slender talons, for a shiny silver metal mask and what looks like extendend Wolverine claws (I’ll touch on Vega a little more in a bit).   I’m not saying that they should have gone the way of the 1994 movie, because we know how it turned out, but to me it seemed like The Legend of Chun Li tried to be a little TOO serious for the material it was covering and even for what was in it’s own story.

Speaking of the story, the way it moved along seemed extremely convenient.  For example, Chun Li was in Bangkok living in the slums and trying to get a lead on Bison.  The voice over said something like, “I need to do a little research.”  So Chun Li decides to go into a local internet cafe.  I should note again that this internet cafe was located in Bangkok, in the slums, in a giant tent, AND the sign was written in all capital letters INTERNET CAFE.  Anyone see the problem with that?  So the scene goes on:  Chun Li enters the internet cafe.  She sits down at a computer.  She types a few letters on a keyboard.  A news article with Bison’s picture comes on.  She clicks the mouse.  Another news article comes up telling where she can meet someone connected to Bison…    This kind of thing happens again later when an interpole agent (Oh I’ll get into him in just a second) saw Chun Li at a night club kicking some guys asses.  He was all like, Huh? I wonder who that chick was?  So he got on the internet and found a picture of her dear ole dad.  He says, “This guy’s got skeletons” (an actual line from the movie) and clicks the mouse.  HEY!!!  It’s a picture of Chun Li!  SO THAT’S WHO SHE IS!! I love you internet for showing me the way!!  The point is, these overly convienient things happen quite often in the movie.  And there is no excuse for it.  It’s just bad writing.  Plain and simple. Which brings me to the police and the interlope agent.

Moon Bloodgood is a Chinese police officer that speaks perfect English and seemingly no Chinese. and Chris Klein plays an American Interpole agent that’s sent to China to investigate the murders of a bunch of mafia bosses.  Together they encounter all sorts of misadventures as couple of wacky partners in the new Fox comedy called American Cops in China!  Wait, that last sentence was wrong.  They’re both in Street Fighter.  And neither one of their characters nor any police officer in the movie does ANYTHING.  At all!  Their scenes, their character, do absolutely positiviely NOTHING to move the story along.  In fact if you cut out all of their scenes the movie would have been pretty much exactly the same.  Only shorter.  Maybe better.  As I sat there watching I kept thinking, Ok they have to do something soon that’s going to be important.  Then it happened!  Toward the end of the movie there is a giant police shootout.  And that’s what it was all building up to.  But I mean, you have to have the shootout right?  It is an action movie after all.  Isn’t that right Fox?

What I would have liked to seen is to have all the scenes with these cops taken out and replaced with some better character development for the actual Street Fighter characters and especially Vega, because he wasn’t developed at all.  He just came in and killed some guys, then got beat up by Chun Li.  At one point his mask came off and she scratched his face.  He got pissed, but nobody really knows why.  I mean obviously you know why if you’ve played the game.  But if someone watching isn’t familiar they’ll be like, “it was just a scratch.  I’m sure it will heal.  No big deal.  Why’d he get so pissed?”

The last two things I want to touch on are the fight scenes and the special effects.  Throughout the movie there are some scattered martial arts moves that are pretty cool.  Nothing that we haven’t seen before, but just were pulled off well.  But with every fight that was going good, and I’d start to get into it, they’d suddenly do some strange slow motion flying or flipping kick in the air.  Something that was probably supposed to look really cool, but didn’t.  And it just took me right out of the fight scene.  And it never failed because they do it EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Overall the fight scenes were nothing more than fast camera moves and quick cuts.  There wasn’t very much meat at all to them.

The special effects… sucked.  I’ve seen better effects on youtube.  And I’m not joking.

The major downfall from the beginning with this movie is it was just trying to take itself way to seriously. It’s trying way to hard to be the Batman Begins of the Street Fighter series. And it doesn’t work.  It’s just not the kind of approach you take to an adaptation of something like Street Fighter.

So was there anything good about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li?  The answer to that is yes.  The best thing about the movie was at the end they mention Ryu.  And thus the reason I wanted this film to be a success.  Because I would like them to go on and make a movie about Ken and Ryu.  I just hope they have a better script.

I know this entire “review” was pretty negative, but there really wasn’t anything that great about the movie.  But then again that’s one persons opinion.   One of the reasons I’ve never been a fan of reviews is because they always seem like they’re the end all opinion of a movie.  And that’s not what I want to present here.  I just want to let all the readers know what I personally thought of the movie.  But by all means go out and make up your own mind about the movie.  And then come back and tell everyone what you thought on the FORUMS!

Rating: * (horrible)