So I decided, since I go to so many movies nowadays that for once I’ll go against my instincts and take my younger brother out to see this new Street Fighter film – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. I knew this movie was going to be horrible however, I must say that I left the theatre with a feeling like I had got more than I expected, which I guess is not hard with what little expectations I began the night with. I still thought the movie was bad, but I ended up enjoying a little more than half of the fight scenes – mostly the first half – in a little guilty pleasure kind of way and I even thought that Michael Clarke Duncan fit the role of Balrog.

So with these thoughts in mind I felt very odd trying to write a review for the movie, I just couldn’t muster the correct amount of hatred that comes with a movie like this as I sat infront of my PC. Then I walked around and idled for a while and popped in the DVD for Kung Fu Panda and watched that for the first time since I saw it in theatres and got some real perspective as what a kung fu action film is supposed to be like. Now imagine KFP with real people, and without the kiddy jokes, it would be perfect. I can just imagine how awesome some of the fight sequences would be like if they were then directed by someone like Yimou Zhang [also did “House of Flying Daggers” (2004)].

Now some people may be asking me how I get off comparing Kung Fu Panda to this Street Fighter movie. Well the way I see it both of these movies have the same ambition, both are there to entertain with some nice kung fu action and have the basic plot point being the development of the main character’s – Po for KFP, and Chun-Li for SF – skills in order to defeat the undefeatable enemy – Tai Long for KFP and M. Bison for SF. However one movie is obviously far superior to the other and for all the right reasons.

Street Fighter uses with the word Fighter in their title but I find it odd that the only fights I enjoyed in the film were those with Balrog in it. M. Bison [Neal McDonough] and Vega [Taboo] have possibly the most insincere fight scenes I’ve seen since I watched The Wrestler. I at no point believed these actors or thought that it looked cool. That brings up another thing, they decided to use some really poor graphics for Gen [Robin Shou] and Chun-Li [Kristin Kreuk] when they ever did a qi [or whatever you want to call it] attack. These visual effects reminded me of the 1994 Street Fighter movie, and me mentioning that alone reduces the score this movie can receive by 1 point more.

Overall I don’t think you should be watching this film, but at the same time it isn’t the worst of 2009 by far. I’m also willing to predict that the upcoming Dragonball Evolution film will be worse than this movie by a mile and a half. However, I can say that I could see myself in a year watching this movie again casually on TV when it’s on HBO and those channels.

IMDB says 6.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 0%

I say 2.5/10