Review of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) by Azle E — 09 Sep 2010

Boy, this film misses the mark and does so by quite some way. This second attempt to launch a film franchise based on the iconic video games smartly chooses to focus on just one character's story but is let down by some extremely sloppy direction, dull and generic action sequences and a couple of underwhelming performances.

While I like the idea of Neal McDonough and Michael Clarke Duncan as the film's villain and henchman, they are given next to nothing to work with. Their lines are frequently cliche-laden and Bartkowiak decides to hold the camera on them for an extra beat at the end of scenes which usually makes the cheesiness of their last line all the more apparent.

Those looking forward to seeing a good dose of Vega, who was always the character I most enjoyed playing as in the game, are likely to be disappointed as he is only really in two scenes. Robin Shou makes much more of an impression as Chun-Li's trainer Gen, though the script attempts to pull a 'he's dead' trick on us fall pretty flat as it will be obvious to most that he will have survived the attack.

Kristin Kreuk is actually not at all bad as Chun-Li, handling the dialog pretty well but more crucially capturing her character's speedy and athletic attacks from the game. While I think she could have shown more emotion (either openly or by showing that she was repressing it) at parts of the story, particularly following a major event two thirds of the way through, she gives a pretty sympathetic performance as the young woman looking for revenge.

Chris Klein as Interpol agent Nash though is a different case altogether. As with McDonough and Clarke Duncan, his performance does suffer a little from some misguided attempts to hold the camera on him in an attempt to give his line readings some gravitas. What particularly irritated me was the 'growling' inflection he gives every line which sounds too ridiculous to make those line readings credible.

Perhaps with sharper direction and editing the film could at least have generated some tension from its fight sequences which, while competent, are far from thrilling. Instead it is just yet another video game adaptation that never quite hits its tone or reaches its potential being more boring than terrible.