Who here honestly expected Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li to be any good? If you paid good money to see this film, not only do you deserve to witness this year's worst motion picture; you also deserve to be crushed by a bonus room full of twenty barrels. (If, on the other hand, you paid for your ticket with stolen money, then you're still a fool for knowingly putting yourself through cinematic torture. I can only hope you had the good sense to stumble in drunk.)
Wherefore art thou, Bonus Stage?
Which brings me to my next question: at which point did Capcom decide it'd be more fun to remove bonus stages from all future installments of Street Fighter? I loved punishing those bricks in what was essentially a strange tip of the hat to Super Mario. And the car-smashing stage? Sponsorship opportunities abound!
You could be smashing this brand new Audi A8 L6.0 W12 quattro tiptronic valued at over $345,000!
Back to the film. I've been hearing the word 'disappointing' being thrown around a lot in reviews and blogs. Quit yer daydreaming, melon-head! At this stage of the game, I'd say it was scientifically impossible to be disappointed by a videogame-to-film adaptation and vice versa. If Van Damme and Kylie Minogue couldn't pull it off in '94, what chance did these guys have? All these guys had was a little eye candy in Kristin Kreuk's Chun-Li.
Okay, maybe a little more than "a little".
While JCVD and company had on their hands a film that was so-bad-it-might-be-funny-if-you're-drunk, this film just looks plain bad. There's no joy in its bad-ness.
Attention budding film-makers, for I have here the secret to a good Street Fighter movie:
Non-stop fight scenes and a Chun-Li shower scene that culminates in a fight with Vega.
No, wait, sorry. That film has already been made.
I've never quite understood it, but hadoukens and green men don't look quite so ridiculous in cartoons.
