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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Monday, August 18, 2025

Street Fighter' doesn't stand a fighting chance

It is not easy to critique "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" without feeling bad for it; it's like reviewing a four-year-old's drawing of his family. This movie is so terrible that it's not "so bad it's good." It's so bad that it goes past good, past bad, and to "arranging the contents of a trash can would have been a better use of two hours."

The film feels as though a 13-year-old boy watched "Batman Begins" (2005), thought it was the best movie ever, and then decided to improve upon it by replacing the characters with those from the "Street Fighter" video games. Unfortunately, because of this transposition, the film's logic completely fails. Characters move as if they are being pulled by strings; not one has any discernable motivation.

Chun-Li (played by Kristin Kreuk) is a concert pianist who lost her father at an early age, feels that there are great injustices in the world, and recently lost her mother as well. Her lack of direction is spelled out through such poetic voiceovers as, "The path in front of me was empty. I couldn't help feeling like I was being led somewhere new. Was this mysterious scroll a message?"

So what does she do? Go to Bangkok, of course! This choice is somewhat understandable in the scheme of things, since an old lady who talks like a fortune cookie -- a trait shared by many characters in the film -- told her to do so. Once in Bangkok, though, her choice to live as a vagrant out of some mysterious sense of duty is never explained. Thankfully, despite the montage of rough living, she remains as pretty and physically fit as ever.

Watching Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li is like watching a requiem for her career. She proves that she really has one mode: anxiously confused (or perhaps confusedly anxious). Her voiceovers, as the aforementioned quote implies, are painful, and she delivers them in a voice so breathy that she must have engaged in sexual activity before reading each line. Even worse, the movie continuously spends far too much time attempting to put pathos into Chun-Li's plight when the acting and the script make emotional investment as unappealing as a financial investment in AIG.

She finally encounters Gen, a cross between Liam Neeson's character in "Batman Begins" and Morpheus from "The Matrix" (1999) but with no personality. He teaches her the ways of the Force or whatever it is. Chun-Li soon learns how to fight in a way that looks like a cross between the choreography of "High School Musical" (2006) and "Chicago" (2002) and the combat of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000). The scenes look like they were directed by the sick love-child of Christopher Nolan and Baz Luhrmann.

Oh, and Chun-Li can shoot energy balls. No, that's never really explained.

After her training, Chun-Li fights M. Bison (Neal McDonough), the evil crime lord who sold his soul for a fake Irish accent, which won't be discussed here. Also not discussed will be M. Bison's henchman, Balrog (Michael Clark Duncan), whose performance gives a similar sensation that viewers feel watching Kreuk, i.e. a priest closing the coffin on a promising actor's career.

Besides the aforementioned atrocities, the film also suffers a myriad of other problems, such as its complete lack of logic when it comes to language; it goes half and half with subtitles and spoken English, often with one character speaking in English and another replying in Chinese. There is pointless intrigue that feels as ridiculous and tacked on as the low plot in an Elizabethan drama. There's the fact that, though the movie is set in Bangkok, almost every character is white. There's a contrived scene of girl-on-girl flirtation which leads to the film's only saving grace, a ridiculous and fun catfight set in a bathroom. And finally, the movie strings viewers along on a mystery, which they won't care about.

Not only will viewers be bored by this exercise in adaptations that should not have happened, but they will be confused as well. "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" fails on all levels.