Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li DVD

Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
 
You know the problem with videogame adaptations? Reality. Sure within a game you can believe that people can throw fireballs, can do twenty kicks in a few seconds and that they can fly, but once you bring that world into ours… it falls on its face… sometimes quite literally.
 
Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li almost makes it. In fact, this is one of the few videogame adaptations that actually works as a film, in theory. Writer Justin Marks has tried hard to bring depth to all the characters presented from the game, tried to make them real and to some extent it works. Sadly, however, not as well as they would have liked… although I must say, compared to the original Streetfighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, this is a masterpiece!
 
The story is a simple revenge tale. Bison (Neal McDonough), an underworld crime boss, has kidnapped Chun-Li's father and forces him to help in. He agrees in order to save the life of his family. Years later, Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) is all grown up and ready for revenge. She travels to Bangkok to seek out Gen (Robin Shou) a master to teach her how to defeat Bison. Bison is also being pursued by the police Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) and Maya (Moon Bloodgood) and trying to discover what he is doing to shake up the underworld. It involves a lot of violence helpfully provided by Vega (Blackeyed Peas' Taboo) and Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan). Chun-Li must learn all she can from Gen and join forces with Charlie and Mya to put an end to Bison's plans once and for all.
 
Now this film is just ninety minutes of action. Those of you expecting 'The Heat of Kung-Fu films' will be sadly disappointed. In fact, those of you expecting anything beyond a few action scenes strung together with a lot of confused plot strands will also be sadly disappointed. These scenes are excellent in general, the action is choreographed well and do not overstay their welcome. However, great fights are really all this film has to offer as the acting is a little wooden to say the least. Watching Michael Clarke Duncan bumble around the screen it's hard to imagine that he can use the phrase 'Academy Award Nominated' before his name. McDonough makes a great Bison (certainly better than Raul Julia's) and rather than make him an insane megalomaniac he is pitched somewhere between Wall Street's Gordon Gecko and Collateral's Vincent and it works well until his fight scenes, which see every move he does accompanied by the sound of a lion roaring which at first was quite effective, but then by the third one was just embarrassing.
 
Finally and most importantly we come to Kreuk as Chun-Li. Now she certainly has put a lot of effort in terms of martial arts work, but she is so dull to watch that even the fact she is insanely gorgeous cannot stop me from being bored by her. Her narration that covers the film, reminds me of the awful voice-overs to the original Bladerunner and there was a part of me that wished the 'Unrated Version' would have exorcised this.
 
Sadly that was not to be.
 
Yes, this disk comes with two versions of the film 'Theatrical' and 'Unrated'. The differences between the two I couldn't tell you, despite the fact that there is over fifteen minutes of deleted scenes on this disk (none of which add much to the story and all not really worth watching) the difference time-wise equates to forty-six seconds! FORTY SIX!??? As I say, where they were added I couldn't tell you, but all I can assume is that it was extra violence for some of the fights, though I honestly never noticed and would probably have to watch both versions on two TVs side by side to see it.
 
It should be said, Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li did not skimp on the special features and this has to be praised, because rather than being full of 'pat myself on the back for all the good work' they at least focus on the parts that should be given the spotlight, namely the fight scenes and the history of Streetfighter. The commentary provided by Patrick Aiello, Ashok Amritraj, Neal McDonough and Chris Klein is actually pretty entertaining and at least indicated that the film was fun to make, if only a tenth of that enjoyment could have been conveyed on screen. There are a three featurettes that go into detail on the making of the film and try and explain why certain changes were made including one focusing on the Chun-Li character. Features are rounded off with storyboard comparisons, photo galleries; including a rather odd game/film comparison which more or less told fans 'We changed almost every aspect of this game!' and trailers including a trailer for the new Marvel vs. Capcom 2 game.
 
Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is possibly one of the best adaptations of computer games to film… sadly that's not saying much!