No Street Fighter for critics
Ha! I knew it. According to Variety, film critics will not get an advance screening of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.. That’s usually not a good sign for a film, and pretty much indicates that the production company expects that critics will be unkind to the film. It’s not as if a lot of people didn’t see this coming.
There were problems with this film in the way it was produced:
1. Street Fighter was made too gritty. Let’s face it, it’s a cartoonish franchise. And I’m still shocked that they got enough material out of the game to make two feature films. The bottom of the barrel has been officially scraped. Any material they make out of that is bound to be paper thin. I feel very sorry for the script writer who was handed this assignment.
2. The casting of Kristen Kreuk as Chun-Li was a mistake. She’s very cute no doubt, but she’s unconvincing as a fighter. And she’s certainly not Chinese. She doesn’t even come across as half Chinese as she’s supposed to be in the film. Further, the production company or the director decided that it was a good idea to divorce from Chun-Li the very things that made her distinctive: the blue Chinese clothes, the oxtail ornamentation in her hair and her large spiked bracelets. Mind you, I don’t want to see the buffoonery of the first Street Fighter movie, but if you’re even bothering to use the Street Fighter material, don’t go away from the things that made it popular and unique.
Compare and contrast: on the left, we have a Japanese cosplayer dressed as Chun-Li; on the right, we have Kristen Kreuk trying her best to effect a realistic martial arts pose.
A view of Chun-Li as she appears in the video game.
3. None of other the Street Fighter characters are recognizable. I have a passing familiarity with the cast of the Street Fighter video game, and I honestly couldn’t recognize a single one of them in the movie trailers that has been released. Since, the focus of the film is Chun-Li, I didn’t expect to see the video game protagonists, Ryu or Ken. However, I couldn’t recognize M. Bison, the game’s principal villain (I think he’s the one with the white hair). Apparently, the game villains Balrog and Vega are also in the film, but I don’t have any idea who’s playing who. Again, if you’re going to make a film based on a well known video game franchise, either use the material that makes it distinctive or find something else.
4. The fight scenes in the trailer just look awful. They are unconvincing. It honestly would’ve been better to go with a lot more wire work a la Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but it looks like they tried to make it somewhat realistic. That’s a shame because it looks like none of the actors have the athleticism or the training to pull it off. That’s a nail in the coffin for a film that has a martial arts premise.
I realize that I’m being way harsh for a film that hasn’t even been screened, but I’m just aghast that no one had the guts to stop this train wreck before it left the station. There are very clever and talented people in Hollywood that have the capacity to make good films. I just wish more of them would have been assigned to this project from the get go…more likely, they probably had enough sense to just run away from it.
Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li movie trailer (just in case you want to refresh your memory):
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