The Legend of Chun Li should have been fantastic, and the fact that everyone knew it would suck six months before filming started tells you everything you need to know about video game movies: they’re where Hollywood dumps directors so retarded they’d feel bad about firing them. And those directors laugh at “Legend of Chun Li.”
In the game Chun Li is an interpol agent avenging her father’s death by beating up a psychically-powered crimelord. In the movie she’s a classically trained pianist versus a crooked real estate agent, proving that they make special double-ended pens for scriptwriters because there’s no way someone who misses points that badly could remember which end makes the squiggles.
They hired their entire staff from a vegetarian sit-down protest in a library, a staff dedicated to ending violence in all it’s forms, and the end result makes a YouTube’s “Top 10 Kitten Clips!” look like Bloodsport Squared: This Time It’s Just Van Damme Versus His Evil Clone. But if the scriptwriter was a pacifist the casting director’s parents were killed by Street Fighting. Kristin Kreuk’s entire acting history of violent encounters is “wanting to sleep with Superman”, which does demonstrate incredible physical bravery but isn’t quite enough.
If you’re casting Chun Li and have to choose between acting and kung fu, play the game and compare the numbers of monologues and kicks to the face. There’s an entire Asian film industry based on Chinese women beating people up. Hell, there are Asians in my spam folder who’d be better Chun Lis – better looking, cheaper, and physical abilities you simply wouldn’t believe. You’d have no trouble training them up as martial artists: your only challenge would be getting them to wield weapons instead of inserting them.
Chun Li was miscast, but they couldn’t have done a worse job of Bison if they’d hired a mollusc. Neal McDonough, who you don’t know because the crossover of Street Fighter fans with the Desperate Housewives audience is precisely zero, the Street Fighting equivalent of casting a Casio calculator as the Terminator. He’s approximately four foot tall, according to the movie learned his “Irish” accent in a Thailand orphanage (and it does sound about that convincing), and if you just said “Bison IRISH?” while comically spitting the beverage you were drinking then congratulations on knowing Street Fighter better than every single person involved here. And still being better at swallowing than they are at filming.
Bison’s entire evil scheme was:
- Score a crooked real estate deal
- Murder his conscience
That’s not Shadoloo, that’s a Disney plot waiting to be defeated by the power of friendship. In the games Bison traveled the world with body armor and the ability to set himself on fire, stopping only to provoke someone into a lifetime of revenge to make sure he didn’t get bored. In the movie the only people he punches are physically restrained secretaries or actually unborn. They’re use every trick they can to make him look threatening, from perspective shots to (I wish I was kidding) playing an actual tiger sound effect every time he does anything, but it’s still about as threatening as an alternate Ghostbusters II where they said “Screw Viggo, let the ridiculous little art gallery munchkin be the villain!”
Of a 96 minute movie there are maybe five minutes of actual fighting, and those only count because of the amazing expectation-lowering abilities of the rest of the film. If you got a paper cut after watching this you’d probably go into post-traumatic shock. I’m not saying it’s the least violent action movie ever made, I’m saying that an orphaned kitten raised by Care Bears in the Land of Snuggle-Wuggle has a better understanding of combat.
They were especially challenged by how neither of the leads could land a blow on a sleeping sumo wrestler, leading to an incredible number of jump cuts and half of everyone involved being out of frame – perhaps under the impression that if at least the camera man is jumping around and cutting people in half it’ll look like violence. That would be unforgivable in any fighting flick, but where the entire point of the game is “two clearly visible people fighting” we’ll have to invent five new gods just to not forgive things hard enough.
One scene with Chun Li swinging around stripper poles to beat up four gunmen in a room full of stripper poles, and it’s boring. That alone is proof that Satan was involved. An accountants convention couldn’t make that concept boring if they injected my brain and genitals with novocaine. Or arsenic. There’s no statute of limitations on failure of that scale – the choreographer could go on to cure cancer and organize Jet Li vs Tony Jaa on a burning aircraft carrier – and I don’t mean for a movie, I mean just for me – and I could still slap him in the face and say “Chun Li.” And he’d nod, beg forgiveness, and commit suicide by jumping in front of Tony Jaa in a threatening manner.
The rest of the time is filled in with pointless repetition (they spend a full hour providing the “dead father” motivation, despite his being kidnapped in the first five minutes doing exactly the same job), utter irrelevancy (every action movie needs a mother dying of cancer) and training montages more insultingly stupid than an unskippable tutorial for a door handle. They also add Nash, the Worst Interpol Agent Ever, solely to piss people off as that’s meant to be Chun-Li’s job.
They don’t even have the usual excuses. They didn’t have to kill time or miss the point. They had budget! They had helicopter cameras! In one establishing shot they had twelve Humvees full of thugs tearing through the city – that’s the entire movie right there! Stick Chun-Li in an alley and add another carload of thugs every five minutes, insert one break to change from classic to Alpha costumes, another for her to meet another character cameoing, and the final half-hour beating up a Bison approximately the size and disposition of a loaded Sherman Tank! Instead they spent fifty million dollars preventing a Street Fighter from fighting for over an hour and a half.
The movie failed hard, losing about thirty eight million of those dollars. But unless those responsible are working off the debt performing cavity searches on hot dog eating competition champions, it didn’t fail hard enough.
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