I would start this with a gag about how thereās
nothing worth saying about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, but Iām gonna be
talking for, like, twenty minutes straight, so here we go, Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li, a massive
failure of intent. [Title Theme] 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,
and does so by mimickingā¦ The Transformers. You said cars pick their drivers. Sometimes they pick a driver with a cheap-ass
father, out the car. Now, this isnāt to say that the literary
adaptation is inherently high class, 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, and on the other hand you have stuff
like Earthsea. Did you see those red marking on the side
of its head? Yes, very attractive. I've read about a dragon once with markings
like those. Fascinating, you can tell me by the fire one
night. Wait a minute. Red markings? Like the dragon that ravaged Tavnor? That's the one, do you remember it's true
name? The one to bind it? The one to subdue it to your will so you can
ask it any three questions you desire? 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 shake critically. The presuppositions created by the phrase
ābased on the best selling novelā are broadly neutral, trending toward positive. The same cannot be said for the phrase ābased
on the hit video game.ā The pursuit of the ārespectableā video
game movie has remained elusive, but boy are studios still trying. Tomb Raider and Assassinās Creed would be
the most recent failed attempts at securing some prestige, but letās roll back a decade. Itās 2009. The Playstation 3 and XBox 360 are hits, and
high definition gaming is no longer next gen, itās the standard. Blockbuster video games are investing more
and more in narrative. Genres that would have previously done little
more than pointed the player in a direction and just said āyeah, uh, shoot the dudes
in redā are expected to have a campaign laden with pathos, melodrama, full voice acting,
and mocapped facial animation. 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. In 2009 Capcom tried to capitalize on this
apparent respectability by turning Street Fighter into an arty crime drama. By copying The Transformers. It did not work. I love this job While the dramatic qualities of Michael Bayās
2007 Transformers have been the subject of endless ridicule and criticism, the spectacle
still resonated with audiences, and those profits definitely resonated with investors. From aspect ratio to colour palette to story
structure, everything about Legend of Chun Li is the budget-friendly version. Same aspect ratio, but using spherical lenses
instead of expensive, troublesome anamorphic lenses. Same colour palette, but in broad, washed
tones instead of an expensive frame-by-frame colour grade. Same plot structure with a superfluous Troopcop
b-plot that only collides with the a-plot at the very end. Itās actually kind of unsettling the degree
to which Legend of Chun Li is clearly cribbing from Michael Bayās notes, all part of an
attempt at coding itself as a āreal movieā. It even aspires to a similar weight and intensity. Not just action, but capital D Drama, which
brings us to the other primary influence, Ang Leeās 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. 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. She's an attractive martial artist who works
for Interpol, she's out to avenge her father's death, and... that's about it. Unlike a lot of the 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. 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. 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 over top ruminating on her childhood dream of being
a concert pianist. 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. Both the editor and 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. This is solid fundamental film making. So whatās the problem? [Laughs] oh boy is the script terrible. Thatās not the only problem, but if we were
to point to a singular core issue that's what went wrong with Crouching Pianist Hidden Street
Fighter: the script sucks. The performances leave a lot to be desired,
but itās hard to give a powerful performance when the script consists of gems like this: my father was an important business man Your father was a very well connected business
man. Kreuk 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 is to condescend to the audience like theyāre actual children,
sure, yeah. With my mother gone, the path in front of
me was empty. I couldn't help feeling like I was being led
somewhere new. Iām actually willing to bet that this voice
over, like many a terrible narrator past, was a late addition once they realized the
plot was not particularly compelling on its own merits and audiences were having trouble
following the setup because itās boring. However Kreukās 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 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
5 - Main character learns nothing worthwhile and does not change
6 - Changes are made to the source material that actively makes the story worse
7 - Inconsistent moral core in a movie about doing the right thing And that is the bottom line that weāre going
to dig into here: this movie sucks because the script is terrible. Letās talk about that plot, shall we? As a young child Chun Li wants to be a concert
pianist. Her family moves to Hong Kong. She is taught Wushu by her father. However at a young age her father is kidnapped
by Bison, played here by Neal McDonough doing his best to try and set himself apart from
Raul Juliaās sublime performance of the character by acting the character with a lilting
Irish brogue. Chun Li grows up and does become a concert
pianist. 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 spider
web tattoo on his hand 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 isnāt going
to stand out on the first viewing, because you mentally assume theyāre going to fill
it in down the line, but they donāt. I am, despite multiple viewings, hard pressed
to explain the point or purpose of this mugging scene. Moving on Chun Liās mom dies of cancer. Bison has his business partners killed for
no discernible reason. Bison menaces Chun Liās father who he has
stashed away in a basement somewhere doing something. After her motherās funeral Chun Li gets
her scroll read and the woman tells her she needs to find a man named Gen, whoās the
guy with the spider web tattoo, and then I guess Chun Li becomes homeless in Thailand
because thatās her plan to find Gen? This isn't well explained at all, 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, finances, or contact. 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, then collapses after murdering a man by dropping a shelving unit full of
power tools onto him. She's 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
Bisonās team. Actually, as a part of this he explains that
he used to be part of Shadaloo, Bison's organization, but he grew a conscience so he started the
Order of the Web to try and repair the damage that he had done as a criminal, but heās
only, like, fifty, which would mean these ancient scrolls are younger than a New Kids
on the Block poster. So the next 20 minutes or so are largely concerned
with Bisonās real estate conspiracy. He is, I guess, extorting the city of Bankok
into selling him the riverside slums so that he can kick out all the residents, bulldoze
the neighbourhood, and build a series of luxury condos, but Iām 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 thereās a MacGuffin called the White
Rose that Bison is trying to smuggle into the city. This sub plot leads to Chun Li following Bisonās
henchwoman Cantana into a nightclub where weāre going to put the movie on pause and
talk for a second about gaze. 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, meaning what the camera chooses to look at and how it chooses
to look at it, and yes this involves anthropomorphizing the movie. 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. So, Chun Liās plan to get information out
of Cantana is to seduce her, a plan to which Cantana is potentially receptive because sheās
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. This isnāt necessarily condemnation, but
I think itās useful and instructive to actually break down the why and how of this information
exchange, how is it that we, as an audience, come to understand that Cantana is attracted
to women purely via the use of juxtaposed images. 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, in this case the way that the film has chosen to justify
staring at womenās asses by using a female character as the agent of that staring. Anyway, this subplot ends with Chun Li fighting
Cantana in the bathroom, and as sheās escaping from the nightclub she shoots a man in the
chest at point blank range. So, yeh, heās dead. In a scene that is up there in the realms
of āwhere did they think they were going with this?ā Bison is using Cantanaās dead body as a
punching bag because sheād already said too much. Alright, strap in for a second, ācus this
is where things really jump off the rails. Like, the punching bag scene is definitely
something, Gen fills in Bisonās whole back story. So, in his youth as the orphan of some Irish
missionaries who died in Thailand he used to just steal fish but crossfade time jump
to much later in life when heās I guess no longer homeless he takes his very pregnant
new wife to a cave 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. We'll come back to this one too. Evil guys attack the secret hide out 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. I'll do it myself In the explosion Gen dies, then Bison hires
Vega to kill Chun Li then Vega promptly gets his ass kicked. Now, this next scene, Chun Li physically assaults
a civilian for not giving up private shipping manifests and gets some more information about
the White Rose, but for me the scene is more instructive because of the sound. I havenāt pointed this out up until now,
but the dialogue in the film has overwhelmingly been re-dubbed, which is actually part of
why the performances feel so flat and disjointed: the emotion of the face and lips just doesnāt
quite match the sound that youāre hearing. Also thereās a different character to the
dialogue thatās recorded in a sound booth versus the dialogue thatās recorded on set. Itās subtle, but pervasive. Now, if you listen to this guyās lines, listen lady, I think it's time for you to
go Hear how theyāre kinda mumbly and overlapping
with a lot of room noise and echoes? I think it's time for you to go I wouldnāt be surprised to find out that
most of the on set sound was like this, which is why thereās so much dubbing like this What does this have to do with my father? Many people wanted those connections. People like Bison. The leader of Shadaloo 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. Gen shows up because heās 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 docks, Gen fights Balrog, 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? These two? The interpol agent and the Thai detective? Nope? Guess we didn't need them. His name's Bison Iāve tracked him through
eleven major cities on four continents and never come close, not once. They actually take up a substantial chunk
of the screen time, theyāre a couple of cops in pursuit of Bison and his Shadalaoo
organization, but mostly they just sit slightly off to the side of the action or show up after
everything is over. Theyāre 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 Alright, [cracking noise] let's start with
the whole "abandoning your past life" storyline. The first major flaw in this is that no one
tries to stop her. 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
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 in to another issue: 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, but at the end of the movie she's moving right back into her multimillion
dollar Hong Kong mansion. Living on the streets for a couple 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. 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, kindhearted person. 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, kindhearted, slightly more confident person. Now, that's not an irredeemable problem. 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 turned into the person they are! 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. I used to be a selfish, upper class snob,
but I learned the value of hard work, community, and sacrifice. These are the kinds of stories that we are,
very literally, being told to expect. Any transformation contrast 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. 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. 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 donāt feel the respective weight of these
things 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, 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. 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 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. 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 decision of some filmmakers. Youāre not thinking about the moment and
its place in the emotional tapestry of the movie, youāre 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 Cantanaās body as a punching bag, while everything else is sanitized, bloodless,
fantasy violence. Beyond that is the implications of this scene
on the metaphysical world of the film. So, first, things that happen in movies donāt
need to be true. Like, characters can believe something without
that thing being diegetically factual. It's one thing for this myth to exist, for
Gen to tell Chun Li this mystical rumour that he heard, but it's effectively confirmed later
in the film that his daughter is, in fact, the vessel holding all the goodness of his
soul. That 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, most importantly it does nothing to actually improve the story at all. It makes Bison less comprehensible. It doesnāt 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. It actually makes it worse. By offloading the explanation onto supernatural
evil the screenwriters fall into the trap where the villainās actions are tautologically
justified by them being the villain. Itās fine for melodrama, Raul Julia understood
that The day Bison graced your village was the
most important day of your life. 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:
when people are hungry there's nothing they won't do. Everyone has a price. 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? It's like the writers couldn't decide if Bison
should be using black magic, private military, shady business practices, or a Chinatown style
shakedown, so they tried to squeeze them all in. It's hard to care about any of them since
the stakes are so vague. The people who live in the slum get kicked
out, then vanish never to be seen or mentioned again, not that we ever really connected with
them in the first place. 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 plot line is never resolved. The only reason anyone cares about the White
Rose shipment is because they think it might be a weapon, even though Bisonās 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 alternately
an undercover cop or an Interpol agent. 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. 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? 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,
or does she extract revenge and kill him herself? When she meets Gen does she stick with Interpol
with its superior resources, but strict rules and expectations, or become a vigilante and
join the Order of the Web? 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. So, 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 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. the funny thing is that they failed so hard
that even when talking about video game movies, a sub-genre 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. It does all make the movie somewhat unique. You're not a schoolgirl anymore. Really in all the agonizing over when video
game movies are going to finally be good we miss that they already peaked with Super Mario
Bros. in 1993. Okay, look, how many Marios are there between
the two of ya? There's three: there's Mario Mario and Luigi
Mario Mike. Mike! Help these Marios around the side.
Does he at least note that M. Bison in that movie is more of a knockoff Geese Howard?
I believe this was also the man who brought the terrible Shadow of the Colossus script to Woolie's attention.
city officials: No, we love our slums, it'S where all the people we leave to starve live
This guys channel is really good and I recommend his other videos to watch as well
He also mentions what an editing mess Suicide Squad is.
Oh and he also has an episode on The Last Airbender movie. Just... everything about it.
I'm gonna enjoy this video when I get home.
Echoing that you should definitely check out this dude's channel. Folding Ideas is a great series about filmmaking and the many, many mistakes that are made. The episodes on Suicide Squad, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman in particular highlight just how many small decisions added up to make truly terrible flicks. The three-part 50 Shades retrospective was super interesting too, even for someone who had never read the books or watched the films.
It's amazing how far they missed the mark for Chun in this movie. If you want a good Chun Li movie just make Super Cop or a Police Story movie with ki involved.
Dan go on Castle Super Beast.
Man, that movie made me make an hour long text blog about how bad it was. I wish I still had that document. It was the gawd damn worst movie I've ever seen in my life.