Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

In 1994, Capcom handed over the name of Street Fighter for the production of a new movie that would be marked in history as one of the most pathetic filmic works of all time. With that movie and the Super Mario Bros one, a sad history of movies based on video games started that, with a stumble after another, would arrive to where we are now without a good adaptation that we can be proud about. Fifteen years later and after the misfortune of Van Damme, the director Andrzej Bartkowiak is in charge to return the famous fighting saga to the big screen.

In Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the center of attention falls in the hands of Chun-Li, the famous Chinese fighter that is incarnated by the actress Kristin Kreuk. To avoid the characters showcase in what the first movie was turned, the director decided to include only those that are relevant to the plot, getting this way, a better and a more attractive story.

In the other side, Bartkowiak decided to escape from an embodiment of the characters that could imitate perfectly the one included in the games, to provide to the movie a bigger realism and this way make it more credible, similarly to what Christopher Nolan did with his great Batman movies. This is another aspect that seems to be positive because the important thing in these cases is, more than transforming the actors into cosplayers, to respect the essence of the characters but adapting them in a real environment; a laudable approach when is well performed, of course.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li shows us that it is an ambitious movie that doesn’t want to be the total disaster its predecessor was and the first scenes, where we see a very young Chun-Li practicing Tai Chi with her father, could be the perfect beginning of a great movie with a more than acceptable photography and a pleasant music. However and after some minutes, these sensations are going to quickly disappear with the appearance of Balrog and his fight with Chun-Li’s father. With this combat we’re going to get into account of the reality: the fighting scenes won’t make the grade, even though this is a movie based on a fighting game.

This battle, as well as the rest in the movie, presents a really dizzy mounting with a much exaggerated superposition of close shots that are an obstacle to let you see what is happening in the screen. As far as it goes, this is very common in movies where the actors are not specially skilled because this technique helps to cover up their deficiency in the fighting department, but mostly, the result is more credible. Considering that almost any actor would have been enough for the poor interpretative charge of the movie, the training of the actors in martial arts could have given to the movie a couple of extra positive points; after all, this is a movie that people is going to watch due to its title not because of its cast.

The script is moderately faithful to the story of the game; it introduces us a Chun-Li whose father has been kidnapped by the Shadaloo (or Shadowlaw) organization when she was just a little girl. However her father is remained captive while she has a peaceful life in the family mansion and away of any trouble, except for the ignorance of her father’s whereabouts and her desire to take revenge on Bison so at the end, she will leave everything behind to go to Bangkok and solve the things by her own.

Now let’s take a close look at the different characters in the

movie:

Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk): Physically she gives the size without any trouble; her Chinese ascendancy is very notorious. The problem comes in the fighting scenes where you can notice that she is not very skilled and the shots have to be very close to cover up the problems she has to do the moves. If the movie is going to sell more because of its name, then it would have been better to search for a woman with some dexterity in martial arts. As for the wardrobe matter, I don’t have any complaint about it because they didn’t want to clone the games’ clothes in order for the movie t

o be more realistic.

Balrog: The actor who gives life to the boxer is precisely what everybody expected: a giant guy that talks like the classic strong and rough man. He results to be a very credible character, but that's before he starts to fight because once he’s in the action it is very hard to notice that he is actually a veteran boxer. The most delirious thing is, without any doubt that he seems to be like some kind of Bison's personal secretary and acts as if he were his advisor too.

Vega: The worst one by far. A character that could have been well-spent is an incorrigible disaster, not only because the disrespect to the original character but also his performance in the movie is not appealing at all. He practically never pronounces a word and also breathes making the classic sound of Darth Vader. In the combat with Chun-Li and before he notices it, he loses his mask and instead of the Spanish metrosexual that everybody expected, we see a guy that looks like an Amerindian with an ignorant face that doesn’t have any explanation at all. At first he is supposed to be an assassin but we don’t even see him doing his “job” and then he appears for the expected fight against Chun-Li that could have been awesome, just like the one in one of the old animated movies, but instead we have a very poor battle that only make others to feel sorry.

Bison: He is incarnated by Neal McDonough, who is very well known because of his role in Band of Brothers. He is a good actor and achieves to gain the hatred of the spectator very easily. However he doesn’t resemble to the Capcom’s version of Bison at any part of the movie, neither for his bearing nor for his aspect. Possibly seeing him in a military disguise could have been easier to identify him. Furthermore, his role results to be very flat, but again this is tha

nks to the script and it is not the actor’s fault.

Gen: The guy who gives life to Gen is possibly the actor who does the best job in the movie, which is not an excessive merit precisely. Instead of seeing an old man with white beard we find a young guy who apparently is not much older than Chun-Li. This circumstance will break the way of thinking of the fans, but it is just a lesser evil especially because it looks like the actor is the one who feels more comfortable in the fighting scenes than the others.

Nash: Wait, who?... Nash is the name that receives Charlie, the old partner of Guile, in Japan. But why not giving him his western name if the rest of the characters in the movie are named that way? Probably we will never know but whatever his name is, he looks like a filler character and also he is not very skilful in the fights, which doesn’t make a lot of sense since he is supposedly the one who taught Guile his well known technique.

Definitely we have a cast of characters that reflects, in a very twisted way, the protagonists of the original saga. The problem is not the fact that the producers didn’t search for actors similar to the characters in the game but the poor involvement of the actors in the fighting scenes and because their personality or background don’t preserve the essence of the originals either. Finally, the spiritual energies and their transforming in waves to do distance attacks were also introduced, but they were so bad managed that perfectly they could have taken them away to give some more realism to the movie.

Verdict:

From my point of view, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a very lazy movie where producers could have taken some well conceived approaches to make of it a very outstanding movie. There is no doubt that a good director with a good script can do a movie that could take the name of Street Fighter up and also that we could rate it as “good”. However and even though this movie is better than the first one in almost everything, it is preferable that the saga forgets about Hollywood when we talk about live action movies based on video games, if it knows what is good for it.