Customer Reviews

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I'm as Irish as the next guy from Ireland, and I think our accent is great.
So great you can actually develop it just by being born Irish, without ever going to ireland, or meeting an irish person....apparently.

Where is the name of god (or as Bison would say it "Where in the name of shamrocks and shenanigans"), did he get that accent????
He grew up in Thailand!!! His parents died when he was a baby!!!
Unless he was sent to Thailand in a spacecraft haunted by the ghost of his dad father he could hardly have heard an Irish accent in Thailand.
Much less learned to to mangle one so Offaly (get it).

Also, Inez Yan who played the young Chun li and Kristin Kreuk ARE NOT ALIKE!!!
One is chinese, the other is Kristin Kreuk.

PROS:
- About a minutes worth of scenes of bangkok are great, and show the character of the place.
- Some of the characters names are used, this can make you feel nostalgic if you pause the dvd and close your eyes and don't turn it back on.

CONS
- Chun Li was apparentlty placed in a race changing machine as a child in a scene we never saw.
- Bison is placed into an accent changing machine so he can have an accent no Irish person would equate with any particular Irish region.
Actually it would have been more realistic if he didn't know how to speak english at all.
- Bison punches an unborn fetus!!
- Chris Klein is awful in every scene he's in. He has power-ranger levels of awfulness mixed in with dialog so bad it could have been written by repeatedly kicking over a scrabble board.

This film will make you feel have you wasted a whole year of your life.
You'd have a more entertaining time swapping knock knock jokes with a draft from under the door.

Though there wasn't as many famous actors as in the original Street Fighter, The Legend of Chun Li was as action packed as its predecessor. Kristen Kreuk gives an amazing performance as always in her sorrow scenes as well as her fighting scenes.

For whatever reason, film adaptations of video games tend not to make good movies. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li follows this rule all to closely. The plot is pretty weak - basically Chun Li (Kristen Kreuk) fighting to save her father from Bison (Chris Klein), who oddly enough is an evil corporate gangster in a three-piece suit in the film - not the guy in the red military uniform from the game. Furthermore, Bison's alleged powers come from having transfered his conscience to his daughter so he would not be hindered in pursuing his dastardly plans. And just what are those great plans? To evict squatters in Bangkok so he can build luxury real estate projects. I kid you not. The evil antagonist of Street Fighter fame has been reduced to being a dirty landlord. While I'm not in favor of kicking people out to further elite business interests, it happens all the time and isn't particularly evil (just see what happened in the U.S. after the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London).

Ultimately, as so often happens, this movie is an attempt to make a movie throwing Street Fighter characters into the mix, not to make a good movie. I watched in on a long flight when I was bored, but wish I had just slept instead.

Many have reviewed this as a "BAD" movie but looking beyond the current trend towards super action packed CGI movies, this one is more about the story & the ability of the actors to bring emotion to the movie. There are very good fight scenes that may have a few special studio FX but a lot appear to be actual unassisted stunts performed by skilled martial arts stunt people. There are even several moments where Kristen Kreuk does her own stunts & fight scenes. Some may feel this movie to be slow moving & plain but it has a nice balance of action & storytelling to make it more "REAL LIFE" instead of sci-fi/action.

Seriously. Pay no mind to all the negativity written about this movie. As a part of the generation of the cult phenomenon that is Street Fighter, Chun-Li was my favorite person to play since I am a chick, obviously. When you beat M. Bison with Chun-Li, it tells the story of Chun-Li losing her father to him. When I heard this movie was coming out I was absolutely ecstatic (a whole generation later!). The producers and the directors decided to make the movie as REAL as possible--NOT "videogamish"... which I thought was a great creative decision. If you are looking for Street Fighter "The Video Game Movie"--don't watch this movie. Watch the original one with Jean-Claude Van damme or the many other animated movie versions of this series out there.

The way this movie turned out is a Chun-Li fan's dream, IMO. It left me satisfied, at least. Once again... if you are true Street Fighter fan... pull yourself away from the video game world for just a little bit, and remember the remarkable stories behind each and every unique character we love so much. That's a BIG reason why I enjoyed the game, at least. Every character had a wonderfully unique story and journey they were embarking upon while they were after Bison's head.

A dream come true for me would be a movie/legend made for EVERY Street Fighter character (at least the characters from Street Fighter II). Anywho... this movie entertained me from beginning to end, and I enjoyed the realism of it tremendously. I really didn't expect too much from it, either, even as a huge Chun-Li fan. But I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, and EXTREMELY glad that I ignored all the negative reviews. Do the same thing. Decide for YOURSELF.

Ever since she was a little girl, Chun-Li's sole ambition in life has been to become a world-class concert pianist. But when her businessman father is unceremoniously whisked away in the middle of the night by a ruthless corporate tycoon bent on ruling the world, Chun-Li agrees to be trained by a martial arts master so she can get her father back and bring the villain's empire crumbling down around him at the same time.

Burdened by kindergarten-level storytelling that makes "Kung Fu Panda" look like stark documentary realism in comparison, "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" is a far-from-legendary, barrel-scraping fiasco marked by stock characters, bland performances and rote dialogue.

Heck, even the martial arts sequences fail to generate any genuine excitement or pizzazz. Stick to the video game instead. At least you can participate in that one.

I rented it out of curiosity, I've been a fan of the video games but this movie is nothing like them. At least the first movie didn't destroy the story of the game. Chun-Li never does her fast kicks, needless to safe if you're curious then save your money. I wouldn't let someone rent it if I worked at blockbuster.

I'm a big Mortal Kombat fan and I am glad to see that street fighter has created a sequel that is almost as bad as MK 2. Chris Klien is by far one of the worst actors I have seen on the big screen. I wouldn't blame the editor more than I would have the director and caster, maybe the editor was trying to cover up bad fight scenes and poor camera angles. Acting was bad on a large scale almost making the movie a comedy. Now we have two bad sequels to two really good games.

Now, I went into this wanting to like it, I wouldn't have bought it otherwise, but you can want in one hand, and well you get the idea. Gone is the self aware tongue in check humor of the 1994 movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Instead we have this slow moving, not much martial arts for the first thirty minutes, movie that dosen't even realize that it is so silly. The Van Damme movie knew it was a joke, and succeded quite well, I should add. Here, we have gravity defying wire fu, but this one is supposed to be more "realistic." I love the term realistic, action movies are about as realistic as porno movies, weather it be Die Hard or the Transporter, in real life, this stuff dosen't happen.

I couldn't help but review this one. I had seen the rotten tomatoes score, and read some of the critic reviews. All signs pointed to a complete trainwreck, and I had to see it for myself.

How right they were! This is by far one of the most misguided films I've ever seen. The phrase "its so bad its good" fits this movie perfectly. When a movie has a flashback of something that happened seconds earlier, unexplained floating magic orbs, and very little to do with the source material, you know you have a "winner."

This is partially why I don't give it 1 star. It really is so bizarrely bad that it is entertaining to see where they take it to next. And Chris Klein has to be seen to be believed. He turns just about every line he has into a one-liner, even if it wasn't intended to be so in the script. Its like a bizarre combination of Keanu Reeves and Mark Wahlburg in the Departed. He somehow manages to steal the movie with this absolutely ridiculous performance. I actually was disappointed every time he left the screen after his entrance into the movie.

I openly admit I had a blast watching this at theatres. It managed the make the 90s movie seem like a masterpiece. That truly is saying something. I was stunned, amazed, and laughing out loud throughout the flick. Its no masterpiece, thats for certain, but its a trainwreck that was actually enjoyable.