One needn’t be familiar with the long-running Street Fighter video-game series to see the newly released film adaptation, subtitled The Legend of Chun-Li. Similarly, one also needn’t be equipped with anything constituting a working, able human brain capable of thoughts and feelings, as this movie has neither. Like a failed offspring sullying its family name, this laughable would-be diversion has only its digitally-based predecessors going for it, its many half-baked parts so haphazardly and loosely thrown together that the on-screen results suggest Kung Pow: Enter the First without the deliberate humor. Decades-moldy gobbledygook encompasses the plotting in a simplistic storytelling approach that merely spreads out the complete dearth of ideas or wit to excruciating ends; it’s so misbegotten that to even summarize it would only be perpetuating the offense. Such lack of relevance is only exacerbated by shoddy production values that grainy, low-grade porn can actually hold a candle to; action sequences are so bloodless and rote that one gets the impression that the production was unable to afford actual stunt men, while even basic character development and plot progression is riddled with repetitive, embarrassingly obtuse dialogue and routinely inexplicable changes in topic. A movie like Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior streamlined archetypal storytelling to make way for a viscerally inventive, tongue-in-cheek style; the vacant Street Fighter trades only in irony-deprived ineptitude. IMDb user bar1scorpio puts it rather succinctly: “This thing is not worth downloading.”
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