I saw the original 1994 Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme in theatre with my two best friends. We were all rabid Street Fighter fans, and what we saw resembled nothing like the product we had come to enjoy. Our fan favourites, Ryu and Ken were comic-relief, while Guile was missing his trademark hair, and also he was Jean-Claude Van Damme. Raul Julio, a fine actor, played M. Bison as his final role. As a result, his soul can never find relief, and wanders the Nether planes eternally.
Still, this movie was closer to what Street Fighter represents than the Chun Li movie.
I can’t really describe how bad this movie is, but I must try.
I will begin by explaining a little about Chun Li, the video game character. She’s a Chinese police officer trying to avenge the death of her father by entering the Street Fighter tournament, hoping to face M.Bison in the final match. She’s known for her incredibly thick thighs and having her hair done up in buns.
Now: Chun Li in the movie is played by Kristin Kreuk, the chick from Smallville, whom is not Chinese. In fact, she was born in B.C., which makes her as Asian as I am. Maybe there’s some thin sliver of Asian genes in her past, but by looking at her, you’d never know. She looks nothing like Chun Li much in the way that Jean Claude looked nothing like Guile. They try to explain away the fact she’s not Asian in the movie by making Chun Li half-Asian, which to me, is a little racist. It’s like if Colin Farrell played Genghis Khan.
Speaking of the Irish, M. Bison is Irish in this movie, but was born in Hong Kong and raised in an orphanage. Okay: so if he grew up in an orphanage in Hong Kong, why does he have an Irish accent? Accents are not genetic.
Michael Clark Duncan, of course, plays Balrog, as Michael Clark Duncan has been type-cast as every burly black dude in every movie ever. Here’s some of the movies he’s been in playing a big black guy: Racing Stripes, A Night at the Roxbury, Daredevil, The Scorpion King, Armageddon, Striptease. Oh, and The Green Mile. So yeah, this movie isn’t really a step down for him.
The movie also has genuine Asian people speaking genuine Asian languages as well, but here’s the thing: Chun Li will ask someone a question in English, and they’ll answer in Chinese, and they understand each other perfectly. Then, after hearing this person speak Chinese, and being able to speak it fluently as well, she continues to speak English. WTF? I know with most movies there’s a debate over whether or not to use subtitles, but no matter what the situation is, it’s going to bring the viewer out of the moment. Mixing and matching like this is just confusing as a decision.
Okay: so here’s the plot to Chun Li. M. Bison kidnaps her dad, and she’s got to get him back, so she goes underground and joins this secret society. If you’ve seen Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne goes to live on the streets of Hong Kong until he get picked up by a secret clan, it’s exactly like that.
She’s trained by a man named Gen, who’s a caricature of every Kung-Fu master in every bad Kung-Fu movie, only with a bad teenaged moustache. He uses the phrase, “You need to let go of your anger,” about twelve times, which only serves to make me madder. He’s able to conjure up energy bolts from his hands. Now: up until this point in the movie, there’s no indication that there’s any kind of mystical power readily available to the characters, so you’d think this would completely blow Chun Li’s fucking mind. I know I’d probably shit myself if I saw that go down. Only, she’s slinging energy balls seconds later during the montage. You know what pisses me off, though? Her energy ball is red. It’s supposed to be blue. She’s not Sagat. There’s the obligatory blindfold scene from Bloodsport, and then she’s good to go.
There’s a lot of characters I don’t recognize in the movie, like these two cops supporting the movie with a completely unnecessary romantic subplot, and M. Bison’s female goon, who also happens to be a lesbian, but still somehow romantically linked to M. Bison. Chun Li decides to take her down first, by seducing her in a dance club and luring her into the bathroom for what one would assume would be some hot lesbian sex. Only it turns into an overzealous catfight. Basically, Chun Li is gay-bashing this woman. If a straight man beat up a gay man in the men’s washroom, it would be a hate crime. The fight continues out on the dance floor, with the legally required swinging-kick-around-a-stripper-pole routine. Then she uses a real move from the Street Fighter game, the ridiculously named, “Spinning Bird Kick.” In the game, the move is an excuse for the player to try and look up Chun Li’s skirt. In the movie, they try to over-explain the name. Chun Li’s father gives her a special medallion before she’s kidnapped, of a bird that spins. I should mention now that it’s taken a minimum of ten years now before Chun Li even attempts to rescue her father, or even investigate his disappearance making this the slowest rescue ever.
Meanwhile, M. Bison has his own montage, showcasing how evil he is. How evil is he? He kills his pregnant wife with his bare hands in some confusing way. All you see is him reaching off-screen and a splatter of blood shoot out into his face. Assumingly, he has just ripped his unborn baby out of his wife’s womb. How that works exactly, I’m not sure. If he’s that good with his hands, maybe he should have become a midwife instead of a criminal overlord.
That’s about as far as I got before I became ill, because watching this movie is like staring into the sun.
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