Hey, you’d look dirty if you’d been involved
in this crap, too.

First, the good news about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li:

1. Kristin Kreuk has found a project that makes her work in Smallville look like a masterpiece.
2. Uwe Boll was not involved in this movie.

Now the bad news:

1. That thing I said about Kristin Kreuk was not a compliment.
2. The director of Street Fighter has made a giant idol made out of excrement that he sculpted in Uwe Boll’s likeness to honor him. That homage is called Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

So here’s the plot of the movie, which is based — kind of — on the popular Capcom video game:

Umm …

Uh …

Well, it involves Chun-Li’s dad getting kidnapped by Bison when she’s a kid and she eventually grows up and decides to become an avenger of sorts. And a concert pianist. To say that the plot is inane would be generous. Those leave-a-penny-take-a-penny jars have more sense than this movie.

Kreuk provides some grating voice-overs that might help tie some of the plot points and character development together if either had existed in the first place. She’s helped along by Gen, a younger version of the secondary character from the video game series. No Ryu, but the movie indicates he would be in the sequel if such a movie were to be made. I can only assume the Antichrist would be responsible for such a decision.

There are also a couple of completely irrelevant cops (Chris Klein and Moon Bloodgood). When Chun-Li figures out more about Bison’s organization by walking into an Internet cafe for five minutes and doing a Google search than Interpol and the Bangkok police department have been able to figure out after years of investigations, you know law enforcement is playing a secondary role in the movie. Bloodgood shows her cleavage far more than she does her acting skills, and Klein’s character couldn’t be more of a douchebag if he were actually inserted into a vagina.

Michael Clarke Duncan plays Balrog, which is fun except that at a certain point in the movie he starts using mostly guns (actual guns, I’m not talking about his biceps). This seems antithetical to the whole idea of Street Fighter, though I’m sure it would work great for a movie called Street Shooter.

Neal McDonough plays Bison, a power-hungry madman that heads a shadowy organization. Even though, according to the movie, he was orphaned as a baby and grew up on the streets of Bangkok, he has an Irish accent. Maybe it was hereditary. At any rate, it bugged me every time he talked. Well, that and the bad dialogue.

Of course, there are some decent fights — when they don’t involve people suddenly summoning balls of energy. (Yes, they exist in the game, but they’re weirdly out of context here, where it doesn’t seem like anyone thinks it’s a big deal for a person to create a glowing ball out of thin air.)

The movie clocks in at 90 minutes, which was still too long. One guy actually left the theater toward the end when it became obvious all the fighting was over. Smart guy. Well, sort of. The really smart ones never walked in in the first place.