Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Part 3

So this is it.  This is my third attempt at getting through this movie.  I've been bored, I've been angry, I've been slightly interested in things that I don't think I was supposed to be interested in, and I'm left with more questions than answers about just how this movie came to be.

Sadly, the podcast How Did This Get Made is yet to tell me so far how this movie got made, so I'm at a loss.  I can't even fathom how nobody looked at the script and went "are you serious?"

I can't help but get a sneaking suspicion that the answer might lie in "somebody had a movie they wanted to make, and the only way to get it made was to license it to something else."

So, yeah, that's all I have for an introduction.  Let's try to complete this train wreck.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Part 2

I will not fear, fear is the mind killer.  I will not fear, fear is the mind kil- oh, hi!

What was I- you know what, never mind that.  We were getting back into Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, a movie so bad it only sports a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Let's put that into context: DOA has a 34%, meaning one in three people went "eh, it's okay I guess."  Out of a hundred people, you couldn't put together a baseball team out of people who liked this movie.

It's rather bizarre, too, because as a character, Chun-Li fits perfectly into a martial arts film.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

Not too long ago, I took a close look at the Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claud Van Damme, Raul Julia, and Kylie Minogue.  It was awful.  It butchered what little story the video game had, twisted characters into unrecognizable versions of themselves, and had writing so incomprehensible that I'm still not sure some of the facial reactions weren't from people hearing the lines read out loud for the first time.

But you know what movie it's apparently significantly better than?

For the record, I was going to post a picture of the DVD cover of Bloodrayne here, but I assume you all read the title to this post, so it didn't seem worth it.

Street Fighter: The Movie - Part Two

I was not prepared for what I was getting myself into with this project.  I thought "hey, wouldn't it be fun to watch a movie that I know is big and dumb but still kind of fun?  Wouldn't it be great if I just did reviews of video game movies?"

And to think I have both the Chun-Li movie waiting in the wings for after I finish this one.

I did not really think this through.

Where did we leave off?

Oh right, the fate of the world rested in the hands of Jean-Claude Van Damme, a pop star, and Not T. Hawk.

Let's get back into it.

Street Fighter: The Movie - Part One

Video game movies.

I really don't need to say much more than that.  We just had another movie based on the Hitman franchise come out, and it's currently pulling a score on Rottentomatoes on par with the new Fantastic Four movie.  You'd think making a movie about a bald guy who goes around shooting people would be pretty easy to make, but apparently they just can't find a way to make it work.

I think it's telling that the highest-rated video game movie on Rottentomatoes is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  Granted, I liked that movie, but I know I'm in the not very vocal minority there.  Next up is the Prince of Persia movie and then you know what's in third?  Here's a hint, I took two days to review it.

That's right, that movie came out ahead of both Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil.

But there are certain video game movies people talk about when they talk about video game movies.  Super Mario Bros.  Mortal Kombat (and the awful sequel).  Tomb Raider.

And then there's this one.  This one always gets a bit of a pass because it was the last film Raul Julia ever worked on, but I remember enjoying it slightly even before I really knew to appreciate his work.  There was just something about it that I thought was pretty great when I was fourteen years old.

I'm sure I'll think of it.

So let's start watching.

Ask Erik: Episode Twelve...Part One?

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  When will man be able to travel to Mars?  What life exists at the deepest points of the ocean?  Why did they cancel Crystal Pepsi?

Seriously, that stuff was good.

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.