Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

People are voting emotionally.

Am I Missing Something?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

I remember reading Leonard Maltin's review of both "Street Fighter" movies. He first said that the original from 1994 was the worst movie ever based on a video game. Then he said this one made that one look like "Citizen Kane"! Yeah, I can agree with him. Whereas the original film was extremely stupid with horrible acting, at least they had the nerve to actually make the characters look the same way they do in the games. In this one, they could barely even get a single costume right. Even Vega's mask looked off! You could in fact change the name of every character and the title and absolutely no one would know it was based on "Street Fighter".None of the characters look or act anything like their video game counterparts. Why did they make these drastic changes anyway? Why even make it a "Street Fighter" movie? Why not just make it an original idea? I don't even think people would accuse it of ripping off "Street Fighter" because of how unrelated it is! It would still be horrendous either way. Even the plot is completely stupid. It features M. Bison being the father of Rose and he actually created her so he could sacrifice his good nature directly into her to become evil. We even see a flashback where he literally performs a C-section on her mother. He still has a soft spot for her. Why? He's pure evil now! Most of the hair colors weren't even right! I would expect a "Street Fighter" movie to have the main character Ryu in it, but they couldn't even do that! They didn't even have the secondary character, Ken in it! Ryu is in fact mentioned at the VERY end of the film when discussing an actual "Street Fighter" tournament. Chun-Li says she isn't interested so the film doesn't even technically set up a sequel! Granted, it's wonderful that it didn't, but still very misleading. I admit to not being that familiar with the newer "Street Fighter" characters.Of course, I didn't have to be to even know that they were represented horribly. Everyone in this movie is stupid, even the extras! There's one scene where someone's shot and a crowd responds by throwing fruit at the shooter. Yeah, I think that'll stop guns. Most of these characters serve no purpose with no distinct personalities. You could literally replace them with anyone else and no one would notice the difference. In the end, M. Bison is defeated by having bags fall on him. Wow, it's a "Home Alone" prank that does him in. This is idiotic in every sense, but I guess it might be because it's worse than the already awful 1994 movie. Not for fans, critics, moviegoers or ANYONE. Zero stars

I don't understand why someone think fighting games make good movies. In fighting games you don't need any plot. You play them because of playability. Story can be anything as long as game is fun to play. Only entertaining fighting game movie I have seen is first Mortal Combat. That worked because fighting was the main thing and plot was secondary.This movie has all things that make fighting game movies bad. Fight scenes were bad. They felt like cut and paste fighting. Actors didn't know how to fight and action was made cutting everything to small pieces. If you have seen Hong Kong fighting scenes with talented actors this just look awful.I haven't played the game. I don't know the characters. This movie didn't bother to tell me anything interesting about characters. All the time went with nonsense dialog and Asian bullshido wisdom. Some characters had some superpowers but I didn't get why.There were Finnish crime boss who spoke Finnish. That was nice but I don't give another point for that. Movie is total waste of time. Story is nonsense. Dialog is nonsense. Fight scenes awful. From time to time this looks good but you can watch god movies that look good. It might be hard to find any bad movie entertainment from this since everything is just nonsense and uninteresting.

I honestly thought I was watching some low budget TV show. But then it went on for over an hour and a half...so I began to think I was watching a special extra long premiere. Then during commercial break it said something about the Sunday night movie will continue... I couldn't believe that this was an actual movie...as a TV show it was OK but knowing now that this was an actual movie that someone wrote and directed is just disgraceful. I would like to see the street fighter series made for real. This movie would be suitable for teenage kids. But true street fighter fans may want to wait for the real deal to be made.

Made 15 years after Jean Claude Van Damme donned a blue beret to star in the first live-action adaptation of the popular Capcom video game, I wonder if it'll be another 15 before they try again after this second failure.A melting pot of recycled ideas, not many of which have been taken from the Street Fighter universe, this may as well have been called Chun-Li Begins. The Legend of Chun-Li takes cues from Christopher Nolan's hit Batman reboot and the similarly back-to-basics Superman series Smallville, with Kristin Kreuk (a half-Chinese Canadian) taking the lead as Chun-Li.Ming-Na played the role in the 1994 Streetfighter (directed by Steven E. de Souza) and this version sees her taking centre stage. But that isn't the only thing that distinguishes the two films. Gone are the primary colours and theatrics and instead we have a "real world" story with a handful of fantasy elements. Shadaloo is no longer a place but the name of a criminal organisation, pronounced Shadal-ow. M. Bison isn't the elaborately dressed cartoon dictator fans are familiar with, instead he's smartly dressed gangster with an Irish accent. As befits a martial arts movie, this is a revenge tale but there's a lot of other stuff going on too. Whole sub-plots that serve no purpose. The Legend of Chun-Li doesn't remind you of the Street Fighter game but it does remind you of a lot of other movies. Not only the aforementioned superhero adventures either. Every scene or plot point gives you a feeling of deja-vu. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak even rips off a memorable scene from one of his own movies (Romeo Must Die, 2000). Several moments (especially the ending) imitate Batman Begins but the results are similar to Catwoman (Pitof, 2004).Tipping its hat to video game predecessors by featuring Robin Shou, this is a curious failure, the whole thing feels more like a TV pilot or a B-movie than the major motion picture it's supposed to be.