It should read "Street Fighter: The Legend of SUCK"

Remember the Street Fighter movie? It was a very bad movie. But it still had its charms: It featured just about every street fighter character at the time, the bad acting was awesome, Raul Julia did an AWESOME job with Bison in his last acting role before dying (kinda sucks that his last role was in a bad movie…wait, maybe it’s his second to last role…) and it was just hilarious.

Now we get a new Street Fighter movie. This one centering around Chun Li. This could potentially be really good. I mean, they can easily flesh out the Street Fighter story, make it a bit more serious while staying true to the games’ narrative, and Chun Li is awesome. How could it go wrong? Well, the first peeks at the movie showed us that they had no intention on making this any good in the first place.

So I set my expectations low long before the film came out.

Did I set my expectations too low, or was I spot on in predicting the crappyness? Read on…

Well, they did it. They made a movie WORSE than I was expecting, and I was expecting something incredibly bad. Not only did they not attempt to make a good Street Fighter movie, they didn’t even attempt to make a good movie AT ALL. I was really expecting this review to say “well, if you’re a street fighter fan you’ll hate this, but if you’re not there’s some enjoyment to be found”. Well, I was wrong. This movie is bad no matter what. So why is it bad?

1. It’s not Street Fighter
If the main character wasn’t named Chun Li, it would be impossible to guess that this is indeed a Street Fighter movie.
There’s a few characters from the series: Chun Li, Gen, Balrog, Bison, Rose, Charlie, Vega. And none of them are even close to resembling their video game counterparts. Well, Vega is almost similar, because of the mask, but he doesn’t wear the usual outfit. Gen looks 50 years too young. Balrog is just… a big black guy instead of being a boxing champ (they should’ve hired Mike Tyson for the role, just for the lulz). Charlie… is just some guy that could’ve been ANYONE. Rose is just a little girl with normal clothing and no resemblance to the usual Rose. Bison is a businessman. With blond hair. And no “PSYCHO CRUSHER”. And last but not least, Chun Li never wears her usual outfit, she’s a pianist instead of a cop and she’s just completely different overall. None of them are anywhere near what they’re supposed to be. How can you make a movie called Street Fighter, and not have any actual Street Fighter character in it? Because those are certainly NOT Street Fighter characters. And who the hell are Cantana and Maya? Doesn’t Street Fighter have enough characters to NOT have to make some up?

The only thing with a Street Fighter-like vibe is the fireball Gen and Chun Li can shoot. But it takes an eternity to shoot and it sucks. And when the hell does Gen throw a fireball in the games? Chun Li was incredibly badly handled. Proof? Look at the picture below.

Even Jackie Chan handled Chun Li better than Kristin Kreuk!!!!!

2. The story
As for the story… Well it has Shadaloo… Which only has Bison and Balrog, seemingly… And Bison, instead of wanting to take over the world, takes over a small area of Bangkok, makes it riddled with crime to lower the property value and then buy it at a low price, to eventually resell it higher… WAIT WTF IS GOING ON? So Bison just wants to do fraud? What?

So other than that… Well the story starts with Chun Li training with her father. And then he gets kidnapped(by Bison and Balrog) when she’s still a kid. Later, Chun Li’s mom dies from a disease so she goes to find her father. For that she must find Gen… for some reason… And with Gen she trains to be able to fight against Bison… Or something they’re never really clear about that. Then… Stuff happens… I really can’t say since none of it makes sense.

There’s also Charlie, teaming up with Maya, and he’s… randomly investigating on Bison. And in the end he “helps” Chun Li to assault him.

Near the end, they go to stop Bison from getting a shipment, the “White Rose”(hey, they’re not being obvious at all!!!), which they think is a weapon but is actually Rose (ZOMGUNEXPECTED). So Rose is his daughter, whom Bison pretty much stabbed his wife’s stomach to get the baby out and “poured his conscience”  in her, making him fully evil, and her super nice (though she randomly really loves her dad, and she’s his only weakness). All of that, of course, makes no sense.

So in the end Chun Li kills Bison. And that’s it. Along the way Vega dies after around 15 seconds of screen time, Chun Li’s dad dies and that’s it. There’s never anything actually going on in the movie. 50 minutes into the movie nothing had happened yet. And the events that did happen were so minor and trivial that they didn’t matter at all. And at the end of the movie, all that REALLY happened was “Bison is dead” and that’s it. Barely any plot development at all.

3. Characters
The characters all suck. I already covered that they have nothing to do with their video game incarnation, but otherwise they’re STILL not any good. Charlie is a lame dude who tries to do one-liners from time to time, but you barely ever see him. Vega is an assassin with no personality who gets no screen time. Chun Li is the clichéd “I want revenge on the people who got my dad” character and she’s not handled well at all. Bison is a businessman. He’s supposed to be a dictator of sorts. And as a businessman, he sucks. Balrog… well, he has no personality and he just… doesn’t do anything and he sucks. Gen… what did he do other than shoot a fireball and say random lines gotten from other movies? Rose is seemingly mad that her father is dead… Though in the games she wants him dead… And she literally does nothing. What a wasted character… None of the characters are even close to being interesting. And the lame acting and bad script are not helping at all.

4. Fights
You’d expect a movie with “fighter” in the title to have good fights, right? Well, no. None of the fights are even mildly entertaining. And none of them last more than 30 seconds, other than the final fight against Bison. “YES, FINALLY, A FIGHT” *15 seconds later* “that’s it? … a few lousy kicks and punches and badly done wire work and that’s all?”. Yeah, the only almost cool part is when “Chun Li” does something similar to her Spinning Bird Kick, though even that part is lame because she’s not doing it like in the games. The final fight with Bison is really lame, and Chun Li wins BECAUSE OF LUCK. By coincidence something fell on Bison during the fight, leaving her with ample time to shoot her kamehameha beam and kill him. So stupid.

Overall
This movie is horrible. If you wanted to see it for the lulz, don’t. You’ll be disappointed and will have lost precious time and money that could be used for something more useful. Like 10$ towards buying Street Fighter 4! OR just buying the old Street Fighter movie that was a million times better than this!
The first Street Fighter movie had that campy yet funny feeling to it, making it a fun film to watch despite it being horrible. This movie doesn’t even have that. I’m just… not sure what they wanted to accomplish with this, and why they even bothered making the movie in the first place…

Bad acting, bad fights, nothing to do with Street Fighter, horrible story… They couldn’t have done much worse than that. Whether or not you’re a Street Fighter, you’ll hate this movie. Not exactly deserving of the 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, but close enough.

Instead of watching this piece of crap, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Z48SMWSHs. A million times better, and you get the best movie adaptation of Street Fighter ever, complete with the best Chun Li in a movie ever(see above picture).

And you know what’s worse? THEY’RE PLANNING A SEQUEL! That’s right, at the end of the movie they’re talking about a Street Fighting tournament, where a Ryu “Something” will be participating. Wait… THAT SHOULD’VE BEEN THE PLOT OF THIS MOVIE. But it wasn’t, and partly because of that, it sucked. Hopefully this movie will do bad enough for them to not make a sequel… or at least to make them realize this one sucked and they better not screw up Ryu.

Pictures
Okay, I got you a few pictures from a cam recording of the movie, hopefully the image quality doesn’t suck as much as the movie’s quality… Meh, doesn’t matter really… Let the bad picture quality be a tribute to the suckyness of the movie.

Apparently that's Gen... See the ressemblance?

There's no fucking way this is Bison.. They just... named him like that... As an obscure reference or something...

He's big, he's strong, he's black, but he's not Balrog. Despite the movie telling you he is.

Charlie! You know, Guile's friend who sacrificed his life and all? Yeah, they screwed up again

I thought Rose would be.... big boobed and more Gypsy like... and someone with a personality... what a disappointment...

Gen doing something he never did in the games!

That's all I managed to get from Chun Li's Spinning Bird Kick... sucks, I know. But the attack sucked anyways!

Bison showing how EVIL he his... by STEALING FISH! what a bastard...

More evil than Bison: Possibilities of a sequel for this piece of crap!

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