[00:00] I would start this with a gag about how there's nothing worth saying about Street Fighter The Legend of Chun-Li, but I'm going to be talking for like 20 minutes straight. So here we go. Street Fighter The Legend of Chun-Li, a massive failure of intent.
[00:22] Street Fighter The Legend of Chun-Li is a very odd film. It feels like an honest attempt at taking the video game adaptation and elevating it to the same level of respect as literary adaptations,
[00:35] and does so by mimicking the Transformers. You said cars pick their drivers. Well, some guys pick us out with a cheap air pod, off the top. Now, this isn't to say that the literary adaptation is inherently high class.
[00:47] There are definitely greater and lesser adaptations out there. On one hand, you have adaptations like Annihilation that, while not strictly faithful to the original text, capture the spirit of the novel in a way that takes advantage of the change in medium.
[01:00] And on the other hand, you have stuff like Earthsea.
[01:20] Yes, but that specific spread in quality and the sheer volume of adaptations that have been made means that a movie based on a book tends to get a pretty fair shilt critically.
[01:32] The presuppositions created by the phrase based on the best-selling novel are broadly neutral, trending towards positives. The same cannot be said for the phrase based on the hit video game.
[01:44] The pursuit of the respectable video game movie has remained elusive, but boy are studios still trying. Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed would be the most recent failed attempts at securing some prestige,
[01:56] but let's roll back a decade. It's 2009. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are hits, and high-definition gaming is no longer next-gen. It's the standard. Blockbuster video games are investing more and more in narrative,
[02:09] genres that would have previously done little more than point the player in a direction and just said, yeah, just shoot the dudes in red, are expecting to have a campaign laden with pathos, melodrama, full voice acting, and mo-cap facial animation.
[02:23] Simultaneously, so-called nerd culture has surged into the mainstream with the better part of the decade being dominated by huge geek franchises such as Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Transformers dominating the box office and, to a large degree, the cultural zeitgeist itself.
[02:39] In 2009, Capcom tried to capitalize on its apparent respectability by turning Street Fighter into an arty crime drama by copying the Transformers.
[02:53] It did not work. And I love this job. While the dramatic qualities of Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers have been the subject of endless ridicule and criticism,
[03:05] the spectacle still resonated with audiences, and those box office profits definitely resonated with investors. From aspect ratio to color palette to story structure, everything about Legend of Chun-Li is the budget-friendly version.
[03:19] Same aspect ratio, but using spherical lenses instead of expensive, troublesome anamorphic lenses. Same color palette, but in broad-washed tones instead of an expensive frame-by-frame color grade. same plot structure with a superfluous troop cop B-plot that only collides with the A-plot at the very end.
[03:38] It's actually kind of unsettling the degree to which Legend of Chun-Li is clearly cribbing from Michael Bay's notes, all part of an attempt at coding itself as a real movie. It even aspires to a similar weight and intensity, not just action but capital D drama,
[03:53] which brings us to the other primary influence, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger. On some level, this project started as Crouching Tiger. They wanted Legend of Chun-Li to be a martial arts action movie that was, at its core, a character-driven drama, much like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
[04:10] That's not a bad goal, all told, and a character like Chun-Li isn't a bad choice if that's the story you want to tell. Within the Street Fighter universe, Chun-Li is easily one of the more accessible characters.
[04:22] She's a martial artist who works for Interpol, she's out to avenge her father's death, and... that's about it. Unlike a lot of other characters from the games, you don't have to exposit a deep mythology, explain magic powers, or introduce dozens of other core characters in order to tell her basic story.
[04:40] It is a straightforward origins and revenge plot which frees you up to really focus on, well, character and story. A good cue to the dramatic intent of the film is in the specifics of the editing.
[04:52] The movie starts with a glory shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, which pans over to kid Chun-Li playing piano and her father watching proudly while adult Chun-Li narrates Overtop ruminating on her childhood dream of being a concert pianist.
[05:05] This moment lasts almost a minute and has only two edits for a very quick insert. From there, the film cuts into a much faster-paced sequence of aerial shots of Hong Kong, and the music changes from relaxed piano to tense electro rock.
[05:19] Both the editor and the cinematographer are working to bring us into Chun-Li's emotional space. They want us to share her viewpoint and understand the contrast in her life, the peace and serenity of her early years in San Francisco versus the uncertainty and chaos of Hong Kong.
[05:35] This is solid, fundamental filmmaking. So what's the problem? Ha ha ha! Oh boy, is the script terrible. That is not the only problem, but if we were to point to a singular core issue,
[05:48] that's what went wrong with Crouching P and a Hidden Street Fighter. The script sucks. The performances leave a lot to be desired, but it's hard to give a powerful performance when the script consists of gems like this.
[06:02] My father was an important businessman. Your father was a very well-connected businessman. Kristen Krug sounds like she's reading a bedtime story to a three-year-old, which, yeah, sure, a great way to really elevate your video game movie
[06:15] is to condescend to the audience like they're actual children. Sure. Yeah. With my mother gone the path in front of me was empty I couldn help feeling like I was being led somewhere new I actually willing to bet that this voiceover like many a terrible narrator past was a late addition once they realized the plot
[06:35] was not particularly compelling on its own merits and audiences were having trouble following the setup because it's boring. However, Krupp's condescending narration is not the least of the script's problems. For some brevity, let's just make it into a list of major flaws, though I'm not
[06:51] going to be able to get to all of these. 1. Terrible dialogue. 2. Villain with unclear goals and motivations. 3. Poorly explained stakes. 4. Multiple extraneous characters with dead-end plotlines.
[07:04] 5. Main character learns nothing worthwhile and does not change. 6. Changes are made to the source material that actively make the story worse. And 7. Inconsistent
[07:16] moral core in a movie about doing the right thing. And that is the bottom line that we're going to dig into here. This movie sucks because the script is terrible. Let's talk about that plot, shall we?
[07:28] As a young child, Chun-Li wants to be a concert pianist. Her family moves from San Francisco to Hong Kong. She is taught wushu by her father. However, at a young age, her father is kidnapped by Bison, played here by Neil McDonagh doing his best to try and set himself apart
[07:41] from Raoul Julia's sublime performance of the character by acting the character with a little thing Irish rogue. Next time you move, tell me. I'll bring you a housewarming gift.
[07:53] Chun-Li grows up and does become a concert pianist. Then, after a performance one night, she receives an ancient scroll as a gift from an unknown person. On her way home, she sees a man with a spiderweb tattoo on his hand
[08:05] get mugged in the subway, and she calls for help, but no one comes, and then the scene just ends? This is the kind of moment that isn't going to stand out on the first viewing because you mentally assume that they're going to fill in down the line,
[08:18] but they don't. I am, despite multiple viewings, hard-pressed to explain the point or purpose of this mugging scene. Moving on, Chun-Li's mom dies of cancer, Bison has his business partners killed for no discernible reason,
[08:32] Bison menaces Chun-Li's father who he had stashed away in a basement somewhere doing... something? After her mother's funeral, Chun-Li gets her scroll read and the woman tells her she needs to find a man named Gen,
[08:44] who's the guy with the spiderweb tattoo, and then, I guess, Chun-Li becomes homeless in Thailand because that's her plan to find Gin? This isn't well explained at all.
[08:56] A lot changes very quickly, and none of her friends or family seem concerned that she's quitting her job and moving to Bangkok on a whim, shortly following the death of her mother without making any prior arrangements for housing financing or contact.
[09:09] We'll come back to this plot point later. Bison acts menacing while talking about real estate Chun-Li fights off six guys while starving and sleep-deprived and collapses after murdering a man by dropping a shelving unit full of power tools onto him
[09:21] she is picked up by Gen who takes her back to his place and trains her to make fireballs in an extended training montage and he tells Chun-Li that Bison is the person who kidnapped her father and so Chun-Li starts spying on Bison's team
[09:34] actually as a part of this he explains that he used to be part of Shatalu, Bison's organization, but he grew a conscience, so he started the Order of the Web
[09:46] to try and repair the damage that he has done to the criminal, but he's only, like, 50? Which would mean that these ancient scrolls are younger than his new kids on the block poster.
[09:58] So the next 20 minutes or so are largely concerned with Bison's real estate conspiracy. He is, I guess, extorting the city of Bangkok into selling him the Riverside Slums so that he can kick out all the residents, bulldoze the neighborhood, and build a series of luxury condos.
[10:14] But I'm not sure why he needs to do all this extorting, because this sounds like exactly the kind of garbage move cities are already more than willing to do. Also, there's a Macduffin called the White Rose that Bison is trying to smuggle into the city.
[10:30] This subplot leads to Chun-Li following Bison's henchwoman, Kampana, into a nightclub, where we're going to put the movie on pause and talk for a second about gaze.
[10:42] I have talked in the past about the Kuleshov effect, the principle of montage and the psychological mechanisms through which editing creates meaning. Now, gaze describes the act of looking. In a film context, we are principally concerned with the gaze of the camera,
[10:58] meaning what the camera chooses to look at and how it chooses to look at it. No better are the ideas of gaze and montage demonstrated than when a film chooses to use its gaze to express the gaze of a character within the film, which is itself a situation manufactured to justify gazing.
[11:16] So Chun-Li's plan to get information out of Cantana is to seduce her, a plan to which Cantana is potentially receptive because she's attracted to women, a detail that is communicated to us, the audience, via the camera following her gaze and gazing on the women in the dance club.
[11:35] This isn't necessarily condemnation, but I think it's useful and instructive to actually break down the why and how of this information exchange, how it is that we as an audience come to understand that Cantana is attracted to women purely via the use of juxtaposed images.
[11:53] Being aware of these kinds of mechanisms makes us more alert as film viewers, more conscious of the ways in which a film is steering our attention and our emotions, and in turn making us better equipped to vocalize the messages that media is presenting us with.
[12:08] In this case, the way that the film has chosen to justify staring at women's asses by using a female character as the agent of that staring. Anyway, this subplot ends with Chumlee fighting Cantana in the bathroom
[12:21] and as she's escaping from the nightclub she shoots the man in the chest at point-blank range. So, yeah, he's dead. In a scene that's up there in the realms of where did they think they were going with this, Bison is using Cantana's dead body as a punching bag because she'd already said too much.
[12:39] Alright, strap in for a second, because this is where things really jump off the rails. Like, the punching bag scene is definitely something, but then Gen fills in Bison's whole backstory. So in his youth as the orphan of some Irish missionaries who died in Thailand He used to just feel fish but crossfade time jump to much later in life when he I guess no longer homeless He takes his very pregnant new wife to a cave
[13:04] and kills her by ripping their baby out through her belly in order to put all his goodness into the baby so that he wouldn't have a conscience and would only be pure evil.
[13:19] We'll come back to this one too. Evil guys attack the secret hideout in the stupidest way possible. They send in ninjas to fight hand-to-hand when they have a rocket launcher in the car. Both parts of that are stupid, but it does give us the best line in the film.
[13:32] I'll do it myself. In the explosion, Gen dies, then Bison hires Vega to kill Chun-Li, and Vega promptly gets his ass kicked. Now, this next scene, Chun-Li physically assaults a civilian for not giving up private shipping manifests
[13:46] and gets some more information about the White Rose, but for me, the scene is more instructive because of the sound. I haven't pointed this out up until now, but the dialogue in the film has overwhelmingly been redubbed,
[14:00] which is actually part of why the performances feel so flat and disjointed. The emotion of the face and lips just doesn't quite match the sound that you're hearing. Also, there's a different character to the dialogue that's recorded in a sound booth
[14:14] versus the dialogue that's recorded on set. It's subtle, but pervasive. Now, if you listen to this guy's lines, hear how they're kind of mumbly and overlapping with a lot of room noise and echoes?
[14:31] I wouldn't be surprised to find out that most of the on-set sound was like this, which is why there's so much dubbing, like in this scene. What is it that you did with my father? Many people wanted those connections.
[14:43] People like Bison. I need you to shut him up. Moving on with the plot, Chun-Li gets trapped and captured, Bison kills her dad in front of her, she escapes but takes a grazing shot in a market and manages to slip away once a riot starts.
[14:55] Gen shows up because he's not dead, just a dick, uses magic powers to heal her bullet wound in seconds, and she finally figures out how to make a fireball. Returning to the dock, she threatens this guy again, there's a big fight at the dock, Gen fights Balrog,
[15:09] they figure out that the White Rose is Bison's daughter, Chun-Li knocks Bison off the roof with a fireball, kills him in front of his daughter, Buries her dad, plants some sequel bait, credits roll. Did you even notice the two supporting characters that I cut from the plot?
[15:24] These two? The Interpol agent and the Thai detective? No? Guess we didn't need them. His name's Bison. I've tracked him through 11 major cities on four continents and never come close, not once.
[15:41] They actually take up a substantial chunk of the screen time. They're a couple of cops in pursuit of Bison and his Shadaloo organization, but mostly they just sit slightly off to the side of the action or show up after everything is over.
[15:54] They're pretty much just here for padding and innuendo. We should be more aggressive. Looks like you got that down. Well, unlike you, I don't lose my man. All right, let's start with the whole abandoning your past life storyline.
[16:09] The first major flaw in this is that no one tries to stop Chun-Li. Her mother just died. She's clearly in a deeply vulnerable place in her life, and not one of these people, friends, or extended family
[16:21] tries to intervene when she quits her job and packs up her house. This isn't indicative of a plot hole. It's indicative of a fundamental lack of drama or conflict. And this all ties into another issue.
[16:34] She doesn't actually abandon everything. She doesn't get up and walk away from it all, taking only some bare essentials and living with the poorest of society. Oh, sure, she sleeps in an alley and skips out on showering,
[16:47] but at the end of the movie she's moving right back into her multi-million dollar Hong Kong mansion. Living on the streets for a couple of weeks was probably instructive, but she was basically a poverty tourist. If she ever got tired of living in a slum, there was always a mansion waiting back in Hong Kong.
[17:04] She sacrificed nothing. This ties directly into the character arc. Chun-Li doesn't really learn anything or change. At the start of the film, she's a confident, spunky, kind-hearted person.
[17:17] As the film progresses, she dabbles in poverty tourism, kills three men in cold blood without remorse, and returns to her life of wealth as a spunky, kind-hearted, slightly more confident person. Now, that's not an irredeemable problem.
[17:31] Lots of good movies have main characters who don't learn or change all that much, But it is a problem when your movie opens with the main character pondering how they turn into the person they are.
[17:46] Sometimes I wonder how I got to be the way I am. The writers have explicitly set up a transformation story. I used to be a little girl who wanted to be a piano player. Now I'm a cold-hearted killer who murders people for the greater good.
[18:00] I used to be a selfish upper-class snob, but I learned the value of hard work, community, and sacrifice. These are the kind of stories that we are very literally being told to expect.
[18:12] Any transformation contract is deeply compromised by the early scenes of the film when her father is kidnapped. Now, the problem is not the existence of these scenes, but their proportional length within the film.
[18:24] We're shown that she's been exposed to this criminal world since she was a little girl, and we only spend the briefest time with her as a civilian. This is a really good example of how movies need to function emotionally and not just literally.
[18:38] We can look at the opening of the film and extrapolate that logically everything between her father being kidnapped and her success as an adult was more or less normal, but we don't feel the respective weight of these things.
[18:52] Because it's such a tiny part of the opening, her time as a concert pianist feels more like a brief interlude in a life of violence, a hobby that she took up to pass the time waiting for revenge,
[19:04] rather than the normal world that she's pulled out of. And what little we see of her in that stage of her life is basically the same person we see at the end of the film. The only thing that changes is the number of living parents and felony murders.
[19:18] Next up is the whole thing where Bison transfers his goodness into a little baby I have a couple problems with this scene First and least important is that the intensity and violence of the scene is considerably out of place
[19:34] given the tone and treatment of violence throughout the rest of the film. It's an extremely jarring kick-the-dog scene that's meant to show the audience just how evil the bad guy is, but I think it becomes less effective because it's so relatively extreme.
[19:49] It's such a sharp break from almost everything else that it pulls you out to a place where it stops being the actions of a character and becomes the decisions of some filmmakers. You're not thinking about the moment and its place in the emotional tapestry of the movie,
[20:03] you're thinking about why the people who made this made it the way they did. The only other scene that comes close is where Bison is using Cantana's body as a punching bag, while everything else is sanitized, bloodless fantasy violence.
[20:18] Beyond that is the implications of this scene on the metaphysical world of the film. So, first, things that happen in movies don't need to be true. Like, characters can believe something without that thing being diegetically factual.
[20:34] It's one thing for this myth to exist, for Gen to tell Chun-Li this mystical rumor that he heard, but it's effectively confirmed later in the film that his daughter is, in fact,
[20:46] the vessel holding all the goodness of his soul. This means that in the world of Street Fighter, good and bad are tangible products that can be transferred from one person to another. While the implications on free will and morality are staggering,
[21:00] most importantly, it does nothing to actually improve the story at all. It makes Bison less comprehensible. It doesn't make his goals any clearer. We still have no idea what he's up to, what he's doing on a day-to-day basis, and what his end goal is.
[21:17] It actually makes it worse. By offloading the explanation onto supernatural evil, the screenwriters fall into the trap where the villain's actions are tautologically justified by them being the villain.
[21:30] It's fine for melodrama. Raoul Julia understood that. The day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life.
[21:42] But for me, it was Tuesday. But Legend of Chun-Li is trying to take itself seriously. There's one thing I learned in the slums.
[21:55] When people are hungry, there's nothing they won't do. Everyone has a private.
[22:11] There's a plot in here about buying up waterfront property for redevelopment, but they're extorting the city board into making the sale, which makes no sense. Was the board zoning the area as a slum for purely altruistic reasons?
[22:25] It's like the writers couldn't decide if Bison should be using black magic, private military, shady business practices, or a China's House-style shakedown, so they tried to just squeeze them all in.
[22:37] It's hard to care about any of them since the stakes are so vague. The people who live in the slums get kicked out, then vanish, never to be seen or mentioned again, not that we ever really connected with them in the first place.
[22:49] The big showdown at the end with Interpol, Bison, and Chun-Li doesn't even have anything to do with the whole slum buyout anyway, and the plotline is never resolved. The only reason anyone cares about the White Rose shipment is because they think it might be a weapon,
[23:04] even though Bison's whole plan is pretty much just capitalism. To top it all off, the changes to the source material actively make the story worse. In her original incarnations, Chun-Li is ultimately an undercover cop or an Interpol agent.
[23:19] Changing her from a cop to a concert pianist does nothing to raise the stakes or make the character more relatable. In fact, it makes the story hard to tell because you now have to justify all kinds of crazy crap that's super easy to hand wave if she works for Interpol.
[23:34] Why is she in Thailand? Why does she know martial arts? Why does she have combat training and not freak out the first time someone pulls a gun on her? Why does she care about the legal front of a criminal organization?
[23:46] All of this action nonsense is just explained in one line if she works for Interpol. The character conflict comes baked in. When she confronts Bison, does she stick with her training and let the courts bring him to justice,
[24:00] or does she extract revenge and kill him herself? When she meets Gin, does she stick with Interpol, with its superior resources but strict rules and expectations, or become a vigilante and join the Order of the Red?
[24:13] Instead, we're asked to believe that a concert pianist who learned Kung Fu as a kid is going to be willing to throw herself at a well-armed international criminal organization and not wind up as Jane Doe floating down the river.
[24:26] They wanted to legitimize the video game adaptation, and they screwed it up with an awful script. Every single problem with this movie comes back to the script. The characters frequently make decisions based on information they don't have
[24:39] because the script needs to get them somewhere. The villains are an indistinct mass made of every bad guy trope possible, resulting in an antagonist that's too confusing to take seriously, and entire chunks of the film are flat-out useless to the story.
[24:52] The funny thing is that they failed so hard that even when talking about video game movies, a subgenre that is peppered with examples that plumb the depths of shoddy, hilarious, and hilariously shoddy filmmaking, that they made something most notable for how forgettable it is.
[25:10] You're not a schoolgirl anymore. Really, in all the agonizing over when video game movies are going to finally be good, we missed that they already peaked with Super Mario Bros. in 1993.
[25:22] I'm Mario. There's Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. Mario! Mario! I'll beat Mario's around the side.
[25:52] you