Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Movie Review

Sorry, folks -- the star of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is not the mouth-drippingly voluptuous lead actress Kristin Kreuk. It's actually supporting actor Chris Klein, who may very well be our next Keanu Reeves. Klein must have flash-kicked himself in the brain, because his acting is so outrageously horrid and emotionally vapid he inspires unsolicited laughter. In fact, if Klein had more airtime in the movie, I might have sat through the whole thing.

That's right: I walked out (after an hour). And this is the only movie I've walked out of my entire life.

That's because Chun-Li is not an action movie. It's a God forsaken tragedy. It's a movie that reels in some of the most pathetic, failed actors in the industry just aching for people to acknowledge their existence, regardless of the highly poisonous, vastly stupid script they're regurgitating. I equate these actors to the fat, adult cats you see when visiting the pound -- the ones that eventually get adopted by a guy pretending to be an animal lover. Then, one day you see these scrappy felines at your local hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, where they've been hired to solve the rat problem.

The sheer depression I experienced when thinking about these actors -- along with my buddy Debra's pounding headache -- were enough to drive us out of the theater at the 60-minute mark. No, we couldn't stay for the remaining 36 minutes. We're morbidly curious theatergoers, but we're not martyrs.

Who knows why this movie even exists? The Street Fighter video game series peaked in the 1990s -- which is why Jean Claude Van Damme's attempt at an adaptation made sense 15 years ago (though that was also horrible). But the latest rendition is unjustifiable and wouldn't have even deserved to go straight to DVD. The reel should have been banished to an uncharted island, set ablaze by a Hadoken, and then peed on just to be safe.

The video game's "plot" was quarter-baked and childishly simple to begin with, and incredibly Chun-Li just reuses it like stale Play-Doh. When our heroine (Kreuk) is just a toddler, a tyrant named Bison (Neal McDonough) pays a visit with his posse, makes a mess of her house and presumably murders her father. Growing up, Chun-Li becomes a concert pianist (just as the Chinese stereotype says we're supposed to do at some point) but learns Bison actually kidnapped her father. So she travels to Bangkok to kick some ass.

Sounds like it could be good fun -- one of those movies so bad it comes full circle -- but it fails to follow through. Kreuk looks like a gawky, stiff ostrich when she attempts to bust out kung-fu moves. She's narrating the majority of the time, and her intellectually bankrupt sentences accompanied by her soulless dictation should spur the legalization of guns in movie theaters so you can shoot yourself with them.

Again, Klein could have been "The One" to save this movie because he was the only actor so horrible that it occasionally passed as hysterical. But alas, there was too much of the other junk piled on top of his valuable garbage. The Oracle inside me was wrong, but perhaps he'll be reborn soon.

Try tapping the B button.