The Legend of Chun-Li
In
the first ten minutes of The Legend of Chun-Li, you prettymuch
know you’re in for DTV gold. You get
such treats as a dude lighting his hand on fire so he can use it in a
fight. The same dude using champagne
carbonation as a weapon. A flashback within a flashback. And the main character receiving a scroll
that contains only a message and she ponders “I wondered if the scroll was
some sort of message.”
The film goes
on to be pretty damn entertaining. It
follows the life of Chun-Li (played as an adult by Kristen Krunk),
who starts off life as an Asian and grows out of that to become a concert
pianist who loses her father to organized crime and her mother to cancer. Instead of devoting her life to using her
status as a celebrated pianist to raise money to cure cancer, she decides to
become a homeless person to fight crime just like Batman did back in Batman
Begins. It’s
okay, I don’t think she was all that much of a pianist anyway since she didn’t
perform for a real crowd. She was just bluescreened onto a blurry photograph of a crowd during her
performance scene. But the applause
sounded pretty real.
She feels
pretty safe sleeping out in the open on the streets. I wouldn’t recommend it, I’m sure I heard
somewhere that Bangkok is dangerous.
Chun-Li wanders the streets getting into various fights because that’s
how you attract martial arts mentors.
Her mentor, Gen, has the power to shoot fireballs, sustain direct hits
from rockets, and heal wounds with a wave of his hand, but lacks
confidence. Gen thinks Chun-Li should be
the one to go take down the evil criminal empire known as Shadalow
and he’ll just watch tv or
something. Seeing as they put the word
‘legend’ in the title, you’d also expect them to include some standard action
movie prophecy talk too. But I guess the
homeless ex-Asian pianist who would give the slums of Bangkok back to the
people was not foretold by The Oracle, it just happened. Just one of those fluke
legends.
The head of the
evil organization known as Shadalow is a man called Bison. Although orphaned by his Irish parents during
his infancy and raised entirely in Thailand by locals, he speaks perfect
English with an Irish lilt. He says
funny awkward things like when he compares a business relationship to milk and
says “Even milk has an expiration date.” I would’ve preferred “Our relationship was
once nourishing, but like rotten milk it has become stinky chunks.” Maybe next time.
Language is a
funny thing in this movie. Bison also
picked up a bit of Russian by fathering a child with a Russian lady. It doesn’t correspond to what’s written in
the subtitles, but Bison is dodgy that way.
It seems in his careless youth he pulled an Anthropophagus and
ripped his daughter out of his wife’s womb.
I guess he just didn’t believe the ultrasound when they told him it was
a girl and he had to see for himself.
Then I think he must’ve gone shopping or something and left his daughter
behind and then remembered twenty years later when got home and just had that ‘something’s
missing’ feeling. Now he is using
his criminal powers to plan his most evil plot yet: a family reunion!
Chun-Li is not
the only one after Bison and his Shadalow
organization. The police, including
Interpol agent Nash and local detective Maya, are both on the case as well. These two represent the high points of acting
in the film. Chris Klein as Nash is a
performance I didn’t think the guy had in him.
He’s got Nic Cage’s hair and seems to be channelling The Master himself
with spazzy overenthusiasm. And Moon Bloodgood
as detective Maya is also great. She
delivers shitty dialogue with great confidence and has acting skills such as
wearing tanktops, leaning forward, and using her
biceps to push her boobs together. I
really could see this Moon Bloodgood lady having a great
future as a DTV lead.
Agent Nash and
detective Maya doubt whether Shadalow even really
exists, despite the fact that Shadalow has a huge
skyscraper right across the street form the police headquarters and they motion
to it with their hands by simply pointing out the window. It takes awhile before the police get the
same sophisticated crimefighting tools that Chun-Li’s
homeless existence affords her, such as Google.
But they eventually end up both finding their way to Shadalow’s
core.
The action in
this film represents good variety. And
by that I don’t mean there are car chases, fistfights, shootouts, and daring
escape sequences. Every action scene in
this film is actually a kung-fu fight.
What I mean by variety is that you get a healthy mix of obvious stunt
doubles, actual actors getting puppetted around on
wires, actual actors moving slowly and awkwardly while making spazzy faces, and editing tricks.
My favourite is
definitely the part in the club where the women’s bathroom is actually larger
than the club itself and we’re expected to believe these two women are doing
kung-fu in high-heels on wet tile. I
wish that sequence had led to a motorcycle chase on sheer ice and then climaxed
with a competition to climb a butter-covered rope wearing plastic gloves.
I actually had
trouble renting this one because the guys at the Blockbuster kept trying to
talk me out of renting it. They said it
was unbearable and a total bastardization of the video game. This is one case where I’ve actually played
most of the games in the Street Fighter series so I can comment on that. I feel this is actually a decent idea for a
movie containing (by my count) five characters from the game doing the same
fighting stuff they did in the game. I
understand a lot of people are really upset that this film doesn’t have a
fighting tournament structure like how Mortal Kombat
or DOA; Dead or Alive riffed on Enter The Dragon. But
to me it makes just as much sense to make a martial arts game into your
standard kung-fu flick. I liked the
convoluted story and the totally pointless plotlines involving agent Nash and
detective Maya. I enjoyed the overacting
and I think The Legend of Chun-Li is a pretty good example of what crap
should aim to be.
I also watched
all the deleted scenes on the DVD and think they should’ve left them in. There’s a really good motif of Chun-Li and
agent Nash constantly breaking into each other’s residences and having flirty
little rapports. And my favourite is the
cut scene where they imply that Bison’s Russian daughter is a vampire or
something by having her eyes glow evil red.
I can
definitely see more films in the series being equally entertaining and hope
they use my idea to make The Legend of Blanka
starring Danny Trejo. I hope Moon Bloodgood gets some lead roles in some good shitty DTV cop
movies. And I hope Kristen Krunk uses whatever they paid her for this film to buy
herself something to eat. Jeez, kiddo, put some meat on them bones.
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Valentine.
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out….of The Cage!