Column:
'Street Fighter' lives up to video game past
The movie is passably entertaining to a narrow target audience.
Published March 2, 2009
"Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" is what you think it is. If you like "Street Fighter," the venerable arcade beat-em-up, it's a chance to watch Chun-Li fight shadowy street thugs and a few characters from the game. If you like kung-fu movies, well, it's undeniably a kung-fu movie. If you're guessing it's a mess, you're right again. But if you think you might like a film adaptation, congratulations; you're in this movie's narrow target audience.
More than anything else, "Street Fighter" is familiar. It's a trip to familiar places -- glittering East Asia, moon-gravity dojos, deadly gangland boardrooms -- and it features a cast of familiar characters, not just the street fighters but a wise-cracking Interpol agent and his by-the-book hot-girl partner. It begins with a voiceover. The narrator, Chun Li herself, is perhaps the only character to avoid saying anything embarrassing about our heroine's pastoral childhood, during which she and her father, an important businessman, lived in a mansion and studied piano and the martial arts.
One day, thugs M. Bison and Balrog abduct her father. After witnessing this turn of events, little Chun Li goes back to her work as a concert pianist until a strange scroll is delivered to her dressing room. She takes it to another familiar place, the mysterious oriental antiquities dealer and is told she must go to Thailand, where a man named Gen will make her a true warrior.
After some surprisingly interesting fight scenes, Gen -- who is revealed to be a kind of Bangkok Robin Hood, beating up the thugs and giving to the poor -- and Chun Li find Bison, who is engaged in a nefarious plot to wipe out the slums of Bangkok and replace them with luxury condos.
This sequence is handled relatively well, given the thin subject matter and the necessity of shoving as many "Street Fighter" characters into the proceedings as possible. Gen is the prototypical kung-fu sensei, and Chun Li is the prototypical headstrong protégé, but as stereotypes go, they're nice enough, and they successfully provide the necessary background for the fighting sequences.
The movie really goes off-track when it diverts its attention toward an Interpol agent, "Street Fighter" vet Charlie Nash, assigned to the Bison case. Chris Klein, given an admittedly thankless role as the wisecracker-in-residence in a badly written movie, turns smarmy and manages one of the most relentlessly bad performances of the decade. The dialogue: "You don't want a ticket to this dance, detective," is bad enough, but Klein relentlessly over-delivers even the worst lines in a strutting, obvious style, making the Interpol scenes even more unbearable than they would otherwise have been.
The end result is a movie that's only passably entertaining, and only half the time, but it's a "Street Fighter" movie. If you're intrigued by the list of characters who appear -- Chun Li, Nash, Bison, Gen, Vega, Balrog -- you've probably already seen it, and if you're not intrigued, you probably never will see it.
There are worse fates.
