Many people did not expect anything great to come from "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li," which was seen as another frivolous video game adaptation with no reason to exist other than to appease gamers.
And the film appears to deliberately try to fail to meet even this meager expectation.
"Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" would otherwise be a decent action flick if the initially promising story had not eventually become very frivolous, if one of the main supporting actors had taken his character seriously and if references to the video games had been limited to keeping the names of primary characters involved.
Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk), whose wealthy and seemingly altruistic father is kidnapped when she is a child, as an adult comes under the tutelage of a martial arts mystical master named Gen (Robin Shou), who like her father was once an agent of the shadowy Bangkok-based Shadoloo corporation later headed by the evil M. Bison (Neal McDonough). Gen trains his student to look beyond her own pain in order to oppose Bison, who plans to bulldoze the city's slums once he muscles his way toward ownership, and helps its people save their homes.
A not-too-bad premise drive this story in which Chun-Li voluntarily leaves behind her wealthy estate in Hong Kong to live in Bankok's slums in order to understand the plight of its poor population, who are either hardworking or thieves, much as a young Bruce Wayne does in 2005's "Batman Begins.
But this attempt to make Chun-Li earn her "street cred" falls short in that there is no real reason why she would do so other than to meet Gen on a whim to find out the origin of a suspicious scroll.
Perhaps Chun Li's commitment to the Bangkok destitute would have been more convincing if she had made a more intimate connection with one of them instead of simply establishing a reputation for wiping the floor with a few criminals who terrorize the area. Instead, moviegoers are expected to accept that some mystical collection binds Chun-Li to her newfound destitute friends.
Another friend who Chun-Li fails to get to know, but somehow is on the same page with is Chris Kline's Charlie Nash, a Bangkok police detective with past experience in dealing with Shadaloo.
Kline seems to try hard to not sell the frivolous dialogue meant to portray Nash as a slick cop with a penchant for living on the edge and flirting with his new partner for no other reason than to sell himself as a bad boy.
But the 96-minute-long film does not need to establish a meaningful connection between its title character and the people who populate her surroundings because her mission again eventually becomes a self-interested bid for revenge once Bison, whose portrayal by McDonough is as seductively charming as it could be considering the abstractness of his character, does away with one of her loved ones.
Kreuk is as a consequence relegated to spouting out lines meant to make her seem cool before or after helicopter-kicking an opponent into submission.
Somewhere in-between her fighting is a mystical subplot explaining why Bison is so heartless that is a strange attempt to tie the villain's relationship with his daughter to that which Chun-Li shares with her own. Conjuring fireballs to enhance already gravity-defying martial arts moves is also something that could have been left out.
"Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" sets up its own promising premise simply to disappointedly knock it down in a film that is specifically targeted for nostalgic fans of the video game franchise who are sure to dish out $10 to watch it. More disappointing than anything else is that the film could have delivered much more.
Popcorn rating:(2 out of 5 pieces)
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