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seriousficNot counting the line "Your father was the milk of my organization... but I've learned that even milk goes sour!"
1. After a pointless shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, and to a downright hateful voiceover, we recap Chun-Li growing up being taught kung-fu and piano-playing by her father, until the evil Bison arrives to kidnap Chun-Dad and call Chun-Li a schoolgirl, which is so clever it gets reiterated a million times. And does Chun-Li have a significant necklace that serves as a physical reminder of her love for her father? Of course she does.
2. Chun-Dad at one point sets his hand on fire to fight. That seems counterintuitive.
3. Balrog, played by Michael Clark Duncan, has dialogue that’s 99% evil laughter. At least someone’s having a good time. He also seems to spend an inordinate amount of time relaying messages to his boss. Bison, dude, hire a secretary, don’t have your Scary Black Man do that.
4. Bison (Neal McDonough, best known as the first openly-but-not-really gay character on Star Trek) has the most effeminate accent imaginable. He sounds like a cross between John Travolta playing a Psychlo and what you’d get if Malcolm McDowell were told to play Nelson C. Reilly.
5. After her father’s kidnapping, Chun-Lana grows up to be a concert pianist playing to an audience of lazily-composited green screens. Her dad grows up to be used by Bison for his “connections” in exchange for his daughter’s safety. Considering he’s been held long enough for a little girl to become a concert pianist, those are some long-lasting connections. Doesn’t anyone tell him “screw off, you’ve been declared dead for ten years!”
6. She sees a man getting beaten up on the subway and is the only one to help him in any way. His conspicuous tattoo gets both a Significant Close-Up and a flashback later on. Wouldn’t want all the Ritalin poppers in the audience to forget.
7. Chun-Lana gets one of those ancient scrolls that looks like it might come with an expensive DVD boxset. She has it translated and thought you might think it has some bearing on her decision to live on the streets of Bangkok, I think a late-night viewing of Batman Begins is more likely.
8. Kreuk’s voiceover is the worst of its kind since Harrison Ford’s in Blade Runner. It's firmly of the "tell people what they're seeing happening" school, when it's not mentioning character development they didn't bother to actually put in the script.
9. Needless to say, Chun-Lana is a Super Humanitarian in addition to be a Super Pianist and a Super Fighter, as shown in a painful scene where she has a tearful goodbye with all her servants. Yeah, yeah, stop with the hugging and make with the severance check already.
10. In Bangkok, Chun-Lana has an interminable montage of connecting with the poor via pretentious tourism.
11. Chun-Lana comes across a gang randomly hassling someone, so she gets into a wire-fight with them. We need to find whoever’s teaching street toughs kung-fu and stop him.
12. Martial arts master Gen rescues her after her post-battle swoon and takes her in for training. If ever a role would make poor Robin Shou long to be directed by Paul Anderson again, it’s playing second-fiddle to Kristin Kreuk’s Chun-Li. In the year’s first big WTF movie moment, Gen casually summons a ball of energy into his hands. These balls are given literally no explanation, but Gen’s are bigger than Chun-Li’s until she practices handling balls for a while.
13. Gen tells her she has to let go of her anger and hate to beat Bison, so naturally the movie ends with her brutally killing him. Lawful Good woo!
14. I realize pretty much no one could remain sympathetic or entertaining given the storylines Lana was given on Smallville (see: all the other characters on SV), but Kreuk seriously can just not emote at all. Her look of righteous fury over the economic conditions she finds in Bangkok is most reminiscent of a four-year-old being told she can’t have a unicorn for her birthday.
15. Randomly, it turns out Gen and Bison grew up in the same slums. Bison chose the Path of the Closed Fist, as shown by him stealing a basket of fish. Gen portentously narrates that taking whatever he wanted wasn’t good enough for him. What, the basket of fish wasn’t enough? He’s gone mad with power!
16. Bison, played here by… the lead singer of a Billy Idol tribute band?... takes his pregnant wife to a cave in deepest, darkest wherever. There, he does something squishy to pawn his conscience into his unborn daughter. Man, Planned Parenthood is really branching out.
17. Naturally, since Bison killed his wife solely to become an unfeeling badass, for the rest of the movie his sole concern is protecting his little plot device, I mean daughter.
18. Really, the ritual couldn’t have given him superpowers or his daughter had some bearing on the plot?
19. In a club, Bison’s girlfriend/minion (all evil overlords need one) Cantana gives her bodyguards the night off. That’s nice and plot-convenient of her.
20. Chun-Li notices her (and the camera, natch) ogling the PG-13 rating on the dancing girls, so she lures Cantana away by having a lesbian dance-off with her. And this is the least sexy lesbian scene… ever. You can see Kreuk mentally reciting how not-gay she is.
21. A lot of adaptations pay lip service to famous costumes by “updating” them for the screen, but Chun-Lana’s blue muumuu manages to both not be faithful to the game AND to look stupider than any cosplay outfit ever could.
22. Chun-Li beats Cantana into admitting where and when Bison is smuggling “the White Rose” into the country. Since the movie has already called Bison’s daughter the white rose, you wouldn’t think it turning out to be the daughter would be treated as a shocking reveal. It is.
23. And of course, Bison kills Cantana for his failure by stringing her up and using her as a punching bag. It’s not often you think “that scene was done better in Die Another Day, the Bond movie with the invisible car,” but here we are.
24. In another shocking twist, Chun-Lana’s mentor gets taken out by a bazooka that shoots PBS-Doctor-Who-marathon-bad special effects. Seriously, this movie cost sixty million dollars? The cast is shit, the special effects are shit, the fight scenes are shit… whose nose did this money go up?
25. But Gen’s not really dead! You see, when it looked like he was blown up (well, it didn’t really LOOK like that, but it was supposed to), he really… didn’t die. Or suffer any burns.
26. Bison hires Vega to kill Chun-Lana. He’s played by Taboo (as in ‘the things I do with ponies are taboo’ from the looks of him) of the Black-Eyed Peas. Naturally, when casting a part which is 99% fighting and three lines, why hire a martial artist when you can “teach” a singer how to “fight”? While I’m at it, Kristin Kreuk? Really, it’s that hard to find an Asian actress who actually knows kung-fu? And who won’t laugh in your face when you tell them you’re casting a Street Fighter movie?
27. Naturally, it takes Chun-Lana less time to defeat this laboriously-established assassin than it did to beat up some hoodlums. Maybe he should use a gun instead of Wolverine claws.
28. Chun-Lana is captured when, astonishingly, a dock worker she beats up for information betrays her instead of telling the unvarnished truth. After a spiel, Bison leaves, telling Balrog to kill her. Then Balrog leaves to let two mooks kill her. Then she escapes when they try to torture her. Lucky none of them had a gun so they could just shoot her.
29. The slumdogs help Chun-Lana escape by throwing fruits at her pursuers, who flee. Yes, hardened criminals with weaponry versus civilians with fruit… why wouldn’t the civilians win?
30. During her escape, Chun-Lana receives a gunshot wound (saving a little boy who wanders into the line of fire chasing a soccer ball, obviously) to the arm. Naturally, treating this arm wound requires stripping nekkid and hopping in the tub. Of course, Kreuk is too prudish to do fan service, so this stupidity doesn’t even have the saving grave of nudity. C’mon, you’re a PG-13 videogame movie, aren’t you duty-bound to give us some side-boob or an ass-shot? Just, you know, do the same scene with her wearing clothes if you’re not going to show any skin. Damnit, I have my principles!
31. Did I mention Gen uses magic to heal Chun-Lana’s superficial arm wound? Whatever.
32. I don’t see how dressing the characters up like their game counterparts, which you’d think would be one of the points of making a movie about a videogame, is laid by the wayside so everyone can wear realistic business suits and such while EVERY CHARACTER is tossing around magic and putting their goodness into fetuses and shit.
33. Throughout the movie, Nash has been investigating Bison and Chun-Lana, because all genre action movies need a detective sniffing after the hero to take up run-time or romance the heroine. I haven’t mentioned him up to now because he’s had no impact on the plot, but he’s the best part of the movie. Chris Klein reads all his lines like he thinks he’s Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and sleazes through his scenes like he’s a sex god combination of Sean Connery and William Shatner. Maybe that sixty mil went up HIS nose…
34. Chun-Lana brings Nash into the plot so Nash’s black-suited commandoes can shoot at Bison’s black-suited commandoes. At night. That’s a new spin on a battle scene: Total incomprehensibility.
35. For the record, Bison’s evil scheme: He’ll drive down property values in the slums by increasing the crime rate, then buy up the neighborhood and build expensive property there. That’s his magically conscienceless scheme. Gentrification. Don’t send Chun-Lana a scroll for that, just hire the A-Team… if you can find them.
36. Chun-Lana’s heroic plan, on the other hand, is to kidnap Bison’s daughter to capitalize on Bison’s vaguely defined weakness. I’m glad Bison keeps killing people’s fathers and executing his henchmen and speaking very grandiosely so we can tell he’s the villain.
37. A LOT of the final fight is Chun-Lana wailing on an unarmed man with a bamboo pole. I love a hero with a strong moral center.
38. Chun-Lana blinds Bison with flours, then slams her ball right in his face. With him defeated, she then charmingly breaks his neck in front of his daughter. You know, I don’t mind a pragmatic, morally gray heroine, but not one who hugs her servants goodbye and gives money clips to beggars. Either she’s an unvarnished hero or she’s a dark avenger. Don’t play her as one and treat her as the other.
39. With Bsion dead, Gen gives us an unforgivable sequel tease by talking about the Street Fighter tournament and name-dropping Ryu. Yes, I can see how you might want to get around to making a movie about all that once you’re done with Chun-Li. Because her story just demanded to be told. What message board hasn’t heard “Patrick Stewart as Professor X,” “Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury,” and “Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li”?
40. I miss Jean-Claude Van Damme.
1. After a pointless shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, and to a downright hateful voiceover, we recap Chun-Li growing up being taught kung-fu and piano-playing by her father, until the evil Bison arrives to kidnap Chun-Dad and call Chun-Li a schoolgirl, which is so clever it gets reiterated a million times. And does Chun-Li have a significant necklace that serves as a physical reminder of her love for her father? Of course she does.
2. Chun-Dad at one point sets his hand on fire to fight. That seems counterintuitive.
3. Balrog, played by Michael Clark Duncan, has dialogue that’s 99% evil laughter. At least someone’s having a good time. He also seems to spend an inordinate amount of time relaying messages to his boss. Bison, dude, hire a secretary, don’t have your Scary Black Man do that.
4. Bison (Neal McDonough, best known as the first openly-but-not-really gay character on Star Trek) has the most effeminate accent imaginable. He sounds like a cross between John Travolta playing a Psychlo and what you’d get if Malcolm McDowell were told to play Nelson C. Reilly.
5. After her father’s kidnapping, Chun-Lana grows up to be a concert pianist playing to an audience of lazily-composited green screens. Her dad grows up to be used by Bison for his “connections” in exchange for his daughter’s safety. Considering he’s been held long enough for a little girl to become a concert pianist, those are some long-lasting connections. Doesn’t anyone tell him “screw off, you’ve been declared dead for ten years!”
6. She sees a man getting beaten up on the subway and is the only one to help him in any way. His conspicuous tattoo gets both a Significant Close-Up and a flashback later on. Wouldn’t want all the Ritalin poppers in the audience to forget.
7. Chun-Lana gets one of those ancient scrolls that looks like it might come with an expensive DVD boxset. She has it translated and thought you might think it has some bearing on her decision to live on the streets of Bangkok, I think a late-night viewing of Batman Begins is more likely.
8. Kreuk’s voiceover is the worst of its kind since Harrison Ford’s in Blade Runner. It's firmly of the "tell people what they're seeing happening" school, when it's not mentioning character development they didn't bother to actually put in the script.
9. Needless to say, Chun-Lana is a Super Humanitarian in addition to be a Super Pianist and a Super Fighter, as shown in a painful scene where she has a tearful goodbye with all her servants. Yeah, yeah, stop with the hugging and make with the severance check already.
10. In Bangkok, Chun-Lana has an interminable montage of connecting with the poor via pretentious tourism.
11. Chun-Lana comes across a gang randomly hassling someone, so she gets into a wire-fight with them. We need to find whoever’s teaching street toughs kung-fu and stop him.
12. Martial arts master Gen rescues her after her post-battle swoon and takes her in for training. If ever a role would make poor Robin Shou long to be directed by Paul Anderson again, it’s playing second-fiddle to Kristin Kreuk’s Chun-Li. In the year’s first big WTF movie moment, Gen casually summons a ball of energy into his hands. These balls are given literally no explanation, but Gen’s are bigger than Chun-Li’s until she practices handling balls for a while.
13. Gen tells her she has to let go of her anger and hate to beat Bison, so naturally the movie ends with her brutally killing him. Lawful Good woo!
14. I realize pretty much no one could remain sympathetic or entertaining given the storylines Lana was given on Smallville (see: all the other characters on SV), but Kreuk seriously can just not emote at all. Her look of righteous fury over the economic conditions she finds in Bangkok is most reminiscent of a four-year-old being told she can’t have a unicorn for her birthday.
15. Randomly, it turns out Gen and Bison grew up in the same slums. Bison chose the Path of the Closed Fist, as shown by him stealing a basket of fish. Gen portentously narrates that taking whatever he wanted wasn’t good enough for him. What, the basket of fish wasn’t enough? He’s gone mad with power!
16. Bison, played here by… the lead singer of a Billy Idol tribute band?... takes his pregnant wife to a cave in deepest, darkest wherever. There, he does something squishy to pawn his conscience into his unborn daughter. Man, Planned Parenthood is really branching out.
17. Naturally, since Bison killed his wife solely to become an unfeeling badass, for the rest of the movie his sole concern is protecting his little plot device, I mean daughter.
18. Really, the ritual couldn’t have given him superpowers or his daughter had some bearing on the plot?
19. In a club, Bison’s girlfriend/minion (all evil overlords need one) Cantana gives her bodyguards the night off. That’s nice and plot-convenient of her.
20. Chun-Li notices her (and the camera, natch) ogling the PG-13 rating on the dancing girls, so she lures Cantana away by having a lesbian dance-off with her. And this is the least sexy lesbian scene… ever. You can see Kreuk mentally reciting how not-gay she is.
21. A lot of adaptations pay lip service to famous costumes by “updating” them for the screen, but Chun-Lana’s blue muumuu manages to both not be faithful to the game AND to look stupider than any cosplay outfit ever could.
22. Chun-Li beats Cantana into admitting where and when Bison is smuggling “the White Rose” into the country. Since the movie has already called Bison’s daughter the white rose, you wouldn’t think it turning out to be the daughter would be treated as a shocking reveal. It is.
23. And of course, Bison kills Cantana for his failure by stringing her up and using her as a punching bag. It’s not often you think “that scene was done better in Die Another Day, the Bond movie with the invisible car,” but here we are.
24. In another shocking twist, Chun-Lana’s mentor gets taken out by a bazooka that shoots PBS-Doctor-Who-marathon-bad special effects. Seriously, this movie cost sixty million dollars? The cast is shit, the special effects are shit, the fight scenes are shit… whose nose did this money go up?
25. But Gen’s not really dead! You see, when it looked like he was blown up (well, it didn’t really LOOK like that, but it was supposed to), he really… didn’t die. Or suffer any burns.
26. Bison hires Vega to kill Chun-Lana. He’s played by Taboo (as in ‘the things I do with ponies are taboo’ from the looks of him) of the Black-Eyed Peas. Naturally, when casting a part which is 99% fighting and three lines, why hire a martial artist when you can “teach” a singer how to “fight”? While I’m at it, Kristin Kreuk? Really, it’s that hard to find an Asian actress who actually knows kung-fu? And who won’t laugh in your face when you tell them you’re casting a Street Fighter movie?
27. Naturally, it takes Chun-Lana less time to defeat this laboriously-established assassin than it did to beat up some hoodlums. Maybe he should use a gun instead of Wolverine claws.
28. Chun-Lana is captured when, astonishingly, a dock worker she beats up for information betrays her instead of telling the unvarnished truth. After a spiel, Bison leaves, telling Balrog to kill her. Then Balrog leaves to let two mooks kill her. Then she escapes when they try to torture her. Lucky none of them had a gun so they could just shoot her.
29. The slumdogs help Chun-Lana escape by throwing fruits at her pursuers, who flee. Yes, hardened criminals with weaponry versus civilians with fruit… why wouldn’t the civilians win?
30. During her escape, Chun-Lana receives a gunshot wound (saving a little boy who wanders into the line of fire chasing a soccer ball, obviously) to the arm. Naturally, treating this arm wound requires stripping nekkid and hopping in the tub. Of course, Kreuk is too prudish to do fan service, so this stupidity doesn’t even have the saving grave of nudity. C’mon, you’re a PG-13 videogame movie, aren’t you duty-bound to give us some side-boob or an ass-shot? Just, you know, do the same scene with her wearing clothes if you’re not going to show any skin. Damnit, I have my principles!
31. Did I mention Gen uses magic to heal Chun-Lana’s superficial arm wound? Whatever.
32. I don’t see how dressing the characters up like their game counterparts, which you’d think would be one of the points of making a movie about a videogame, is laid by the wayside so everyone can wear realistic business suits and such while EVERY CHARACTER is tossing around magic and putting their goodness into fetuses and shit.
33. Throughout the movie, Nash has been investigating Bison and Chun-Lana, because all genre action movies need a detective sniffing after the hero to take up run-time or romance the heroine. I haven’t mentioned him up to now because he’s had no impact on the plot, but he’s the best part of the movie. Chris Klein reads all his lines like he thinks he’s Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and sleazes through his scenes like he’s a sex god combination of Sean Connery and William Shatner. Maybe that sixty mil went up HIS nose…
34. Chun-Lana brings Nash into the plot so Nash’s black-suited commandoes can shoot at Bison’s black-suited commandoes. At night. That’s a new spin on a battle scene: Total incomprehensibility.
35. For the record, Bison’s evil scheme: He’ll drive down property values in the slums by increasing the crime rate, then buy up the neighborhood and build expensive property there. That’s his magically conscienceless scheme. Gentrification. Don’t send Chun-Lana a scroll for that, just hire the A-Team… if you can find them.
36. Chun-Lana’s heroic plan, on the other hand, is to kidnap Bison’s daughter to capitalize on Bison’s vaguely defined weakness. I’m glad Bison keeps killing people’s fathers and executing his henchmen and speaking very grandiosely so we can tell he’s the villain.
37. A LOT of the final fight is Chun-Lana wailing on an unarmed man with a bamboo pole. I love a hero with a strong moral center.
38. Chun-Lana blinds Bison with flours, then slams her ball right in his face. With him defeated, she then charmingly breaks his neck in front of his daughter. You know, I don’t mind a pragmatic, morally gray heroine, but not one who hugs her servants goodbye and gives money clips to beggars. Either she’s an unvarnished hero or she’s a dark avenger. Don’t play her as one and treat her as the other.
39. With Bsion dead, Gen gives us an unforgivable sequel tease by talking about the Street Fighter tournament and name-dropping Ryu. Yes, I can see how you might want to get around to making a movie about all that once you’re done with Chun-Li. Because her story just demanded to be told. What message board hasn’t heard “Patrick Stewart as Professor X,” “Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury,” and “Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li”?
40. I miss Jean-Claude Van Damme.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 04:40 am (UTC)They needed something to make the other movie look GOOD.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 09:51 am (UTC)Also, i dont understand how they can fuck up a SF movie every time. Its not rocket science. Just make an old school fighting tournament movie, give everyone their costumes and super powers, and let them fight it out. That's it, Im sure a lot of us would be happy.
Mortal Kombat really knew what to do.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 08:49 am (UTC)