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Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neal McDonough, Robin Shou, Moon Bloodgood ... see more see more... , Josie Ho , Taboo , Michael Clarke Duncan , Edmund Chen , Pei-pei Cheng

As the Street Fighter saga celebrates its 20th anniversary, fight fans are invited to follow along with fearsome fighter Chun-Li (Smallville's Kristin Kreuk) as she faces off against a series of formi... read more read more...dable opponents in this feature adaptation of the popular video-game franchise directed by Exit Wounds' Andrzej Bartkowiak. Previously adapted for the screen in the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film, the series continues to thrive as eager gamers across the globe go toe-to-toe to determine who is the most skilled and powerful warrior in the video-game universe. Michael Clarke Duncan, Chris Klein, Rick Yune, and Neal McDonough co-star in the 20th Century Fox production. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

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27% liked it

205,739 ratings

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18% liked it

65 critics

PG-13, 1 hr. 36 min.

Directed by: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Release Date: February 27, 2009

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DVD Release Date: June 30, 2009

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Flixster Reviews (7,881)

  • jmanard52
    July 1, 2009
    jmanard52
    I gave it two stars because the girls looked good. One star for each otherwise. I just laughed my way thru this one!!
  • fb100002384654145
    November 4, 2011
    fb100002384654145
    I kept pressing start but the game wouldn't let me skip the opening cut scene. An hour and thirty-six minute cut scene. This film makes the original Street Fighter movie look like a masterpiece.
  • skactopus
    September 17, 2011
    skactopus
    Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. What a waste of 90 minutes. Sorry Andrzej Bartkowiak, but this is one horrendous picture.

    For a film based off of a video game, it takes itself way too seriously and this makes the characters, among other things, look more out

    ... read more of place than they should be. As for the story, it is uninteresting and most of the film ends up feeling really mundane.

    The story and concept has the green light to unleash the action; however, there isn't enough of it. The choreography is pretty good in the early going, but as the film progresses it all goes downhill as it becomes less impressive. Eventually it all leads up to the predictable grand finale of Kristin Kreuk taking on Neal McDonough. Talk about the wrong stuff.

    Some of the acting is mediocre at best. The rest is dreadful. Aside from her looks, Kristin Kreuk isn't anything spectacular and her narration scenes are uninspiring and quite bland. Chris Klein is absolutely terrible. He tries to pull off an over the top character, but fails miserably. What few good things this film has, it is offset by Chris Klein's performance.

    All that's left to say is that Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a waste of time. Please move on to something else.
  • lewiskendell
    June 2, 2010
    lewiskendell
    The Legend of Chun-Li is a perfect example of why video game movies make both video game fans and the general public cringe. I don't think I've ever seen so much foolishness in one movie. Kristin Kreuk is pretty enough (in an extremely waifish way), but she's no Chun-Li. That fit... read mores in with the rest of the casting ,though, because none of the other actors in the movie really resemble the characters that they are supposed to be representing. That was supposed to be Gen? REALLY?

    The police officers who were investigating Bison were unnecessary additions, but Moon Bloodgood is such a gorgeous woman that I can't complain too much about their presence. Her character and Balrog were the only two people that I liked in the entire movie. I know that these actors could have found projects that were more worthwhile, so why did they even agree to do this?

    The plot is unsurprisingly bad. All the scenes of Chun Li wandering around Bangkok (looking very pretty and clean for someone who was supposedly living on the streets) and talking about how she had completely forgotten who she was were just priceless. And I never really understood why she was the only one who could defeat Bison, but whatever. It just seemed like there wasn't anyone involved in the creation of this movie that even had a passing familiarity with how to tell a story. And the fight scenes...how did they manage to be even more boring than the rest of the movie?

    This was just a poor effort all-around. It basically just ignored all of the things that make Street Fighter a popular franchise. As short as it was, it still felt much too long.
  • Godless
    April 6, 2010
    Godless
    Finally, a Street Fighter movie that made me miss Jean Claude Van Damme.
  • deano
    January 17, 2010
    deano
    The story of Chun-Li is as predicatable as it sounds, with no surprises in either the unfolding of the plot or the characters.
    Kristen Kreuk managed to turn in the least sexy fighting heroine ever. She managed to make possibly the lamest all-girl dance scene ever committed to fil... read morem. The fighting scenes are not that bad, though they do have some confusing stunts. It is based on the popular fighting game.
  • fb733768972
    January 14, 2010
    fb733768972
    It is up there for one of the worst movies I've ever seen!
  • stuartb1234
    October 6, 2009
    stuartb1234
    Pretty poor film but has a few nice touches and enough cheese to make you smile
  • mrbungle7821
    September 17, 2009
    mrbungle7821
    It's not every day that Jean Claude Van Damme gets some marginal level of redemption. The original 1994 Street Fighter film took the classic arcade fighting game and took it as seriously as possible, which meant it was incredibly silly. Van Damme was Colonel Guile and entrusted t... read moreo rescue hostages from the evil dictator, Bison (Raul Julia). The big screen adaptation rewrote entire characters but managed to keep the stuff fans really care about, like catchphrases, costumes, and super moves. God forbid that audiences see Cammy (Kylie Minogue, yes that Kylie Minogue) make the wrong victory pose. It's always the unimportant things that somehow matter the most to execs. Street Fighter is a campy blast. How could you despise a movie that has its villain say, " For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday." Though the movie does have the depressing distinction of being Julia's last film before he died. Let this be a lesson to all actors looking to take a paycheck role. Years later, in the wake of a writer's strike, the execs at Fox thought they could pump new blood into a Street Fighter franchise. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li purports to tell the back-story of one of its most popular fighters, the diminutive fireball-tossing lass with Princess Leia's haricut. This movie proves that you don't need a Van Damme to make a boring and mediocre action movie.

    Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) is trained to be a master pianist and also a master martial arts warrior. You don't realize the kinds of dangers classical pianists constantly run into. Her father is kidnapped by the crime lord Bison (Neal McDonough) for some reason or other. Three years later, a mysterious scroll falls into her possession. She travels to Bangkok to find her father. Bison has the ingenious plan of buying waterfront property, introduce high levels of crime, and then making money on lowered property values, which is simultaneously confusing and stupid. Bison has a few evil henchmen, notably the giant boxer Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and the masked warrior Vega (Taboo from the Black Eye Peas), who help wipe out his criminal competition. In Bangkok, Chun-Li is mentored by Gen (Robin Shou, who played Liu Kang in two Mortal Kombat movies) and together they attempt to thwart Bison and his dastardly real estate scheme.

    For a movie about streets and fighting, well there's a clear shortage of the latter. Much of the movie is structured around Chun-Li conducting her own private investigation and achieving some level of inner peace. She decides to try and make it on the streets of Bangkok. There are forgettable training exercises with forgettable platitudes disguised as wisdom ("You're hurting me," "No, you're hurting yourself"). There are a handful of lackluster fights and chases, some of them through streets even, but the movie has a scarce amount of action until it revs up for a climactic showdown. The action is also poorly shot and poorly edited, distracting the senses and making it downright impossible to understand. The choreography is nothing special. When the movie suddenly introduces a supernatural element the other characters don't even bat an eye. Screenwriting neophyte Justin Marks has too much revenge-seeking father drama and real estate scheming and not enough brawling. The Legend of Chun-Li has zero respect for the intelligence of its audience. It has flashbacks to flashbacks that just aired minutes earlier. How hard would it have been to just actually base a Street Fighter movie on a fighting tournament?

    Director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Doom, Romeo Must Die) shoots the movie in such a dull manner that the fight sequences fail to even elicit any interest. There's one scene in the middle of the film that serves as a testament to the lack of care put into this movie. Chun-Li has battled a Bison henchwoman in a women's bathroom. The bathroom set design includes partition walls with portholes. Chun-Li is on one side and the henchwoman tries to punch her through the porthole. Chun-Li grabs the woman's arm and squeezes. The camera angle is from the side of the actresses, so it would make the most sense to have the henchwoman's right arm caught, that way her expression could be seen. Nope. Chun-Li is gripping the woman's left arm, meaning that her raised arm and shoulder block any view of the woman's face, and yet she talks through this scene. How difficult would it have been to just switch arms? Why purposely obscure an actor's face, especially in a scene that doesn't require a stunt double?

    Here's a curious item. Chun-Li has always been a full-blooded Chinese woman in the history of the video game. When we see her as a child, baby Chun-Li and child Chun-Li are very obviously Chinese in features. Flash forward a few years and she's transformed into looking like Kreuk, who is half-Chinese. Apparently, one of the less common side effects of trauma is becoming less Chinese looking as you age. Along these same strange ethnic lines, we're told that Bison was the child of Irish missionaries and was left behind in Bangkok. And yet, the child grown up completely in Southeast Asia manages to sport an Irish accent. Anybody want to explain that particular linguistic loophole?

    Kreuk (TV's Smallville) is one of the film's biggest handicaps. The script saddles her with great amounts of pointless voice over, to the point that half of her performance is listlessly explaining what is literally happening on screen. Kreuk is a dead-eyed robot in this movie; she displays some glimpses of human emotion, like sadness and rage, but they never feel remotely credible, like someone who only knows the definitions of emotions and not proper application. Her lesbian seduction dance is a small moment of absurdity. She thrashes on the dance floor and her "dancing" reminded me more of a bird's mating dance without the excessive plumage displaying. Kreuk can run and flex well enough, which is also a nice benefit for a martial arts action flick.

    The acting is terrible but there is one bright spot in a most unexpected location. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the best worst performance of the year, brought to you by Chris Klein (American Pie). Klein plays Interpol agent Charlie Nash who is conducting a parallel investigation into Bison's Bangkok activities. He's partnered up with a local gangland homicide detective (Moon Bloodgood) who takes extra care to showcase her cleavage thanks to work outfits with plunging necklines. Klein is awful to a powerful degree but here's the thing -- I'm fairly certain it's one hundred percent intentional. Being a conosoire of trashy cinema, I feel that I've adopted the skill of being able to deduce when an actor is hopelessly serious or just goofing off. Klein comes across like a self-aware man; he knows this is a crummy movie with crummy dialogue, so he's going to have as much fun as possible. His performance is all forced swagger, from the way he constantly swivels his head to the way he cannot purposely walk in a straight line. He overemphasizes lines, chewing over the faux hardboiled detective talk and spitting it out in a singsong delivery. He grimaces and furrows his brow, widens his eyes to comical levels, and when he crouches in a gunfight the man spreads his legs as far apart so that he looks like he could have effectively doubled as a backup dancer in an MC Hammer music video. It's obvious that Klein has given a staggering performance, but the observant will note that this is not an inept performance. This man knows exactly the kind of movie he's in. I always tabbed Klein as a wooden actor that came across like Diet Keanu Reeves, but I must credit him for making a bold acting choice to knowingly dig deeper when it comes to being bad.

    Readers know that I am skeptical and dismissive about the prospect of a good movie ever being born from a video game adaptation. Games call for interactivity and movies passivity. But if you're going to make a movie called Street Fighter than stick to the script. This borefest wants to be a gangland drama with a tacked-on buddy cop side plot. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is an awful work partially redeemed from the sheer amount of unintentional hilarity. Kreuk is extremely miscast as a warrior woman. The acting is bad, the direction is bad, the writing is bad, and Chris Klein tries to outdo them all in badness, and I admire the chap for trying something different in an admittedly abysmal movie. To be fair, I was never a big fan of the original video game. The special moves always seemed much more tricky to pull off. How many different incarnations of Street Fighter II were there before they eventually mastered basic math and released Street Fighter III? These are the things I was thinking about wistfully whenever Klein or Bloodgood's cleavage wasn't on screen.

    Grade: D
  • Beefy
    July 5, 2009
    Beefy
    Not the cinematic abortion that the 1994 version was, this one actually had a few nice touches and stylistic flourishes. Still fairly silly, but if you turn off your brain I guarantee you've seen worse.

View All Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Reviews

Critic Reviews

Jim Ridley
March 5, 2009
Jim Ridley, Village Voice

Proving that there's no statute of limitations on lousy ideas, director Andrzej Bartkowiak's attempted franchise expansion returns to the Capcom motherlode that produced the worst movie in the entire ... Full Review

Sam Adams
March 5, 2009
Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times

A long slog with little payoff. Full Review

Rob Nelson
March 2, 2009
Rob Nelson, Variety

Neither the best nor the worst of movies derived from videogames, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li at least gives action fans plenty to ogle besides the titular heroine (Kristin Kreuk). Full Review

Roger Moore
March 2, 2009
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

I'd say this is roughly 20 times better than the first Street Fighter movie. It's still a waste of time, but unlike the game, it's over in 95 minutes. Full Review

Liam Lacey
March 2, 2009
Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

Watching the movie, you can't help wishing you had some buttons to press. Full Review

Michael Hardy
March 2, 2009
Michael Hardy, Boston Globe

This is a movie for the overcaffeinated, undereducated teenager in all of us. Full Review

Frank Scheck
March 2, 2009
Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

Yet another video game crashes and burns upon its translation to the big screen with this cinematic rendition of the venerable franchise.

Adam Markovitz
March 2, 2009
Adam Markovitz, Entertainment Weekly

The fight scenes are saggy, the actors are stiff, and the sleepiness of it all is enough to make you nostalgic for the simple smackdown charms of the movie's namesake videogame. Full Review

Jeannette Catsoulis
March 2, 2009
Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

Daddies and daughters lend a wistful emotional core to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, an otherwise generic martial-arts movie with video-game credentials. Full Review

David Nusair
August 4, 2009
David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

...ultimately fares worse than its eye-rollingly campy 1994 predecessor... Full Review

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Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Trivia

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chu... Trivia

  • In "Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li", when Gen (Robin Shou) is performing Tai Chi in the big sand box, what symbol is made in the sand when he's done ?   Answer »
  • Who played Gen in "Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li" ?   Answer »
  • What nickname is Chun-Li known by in "Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li" ?   Answer »
  • In "Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li", what is the white rose ?   Answer »
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