I would have liked to have witnessed the meeting in which this movie was green-lit.

"Hey, here's an idea. Let's go after the 13-30 young male crowd by making a new Street Fighter movie."

"Great idea. But we should concentrate on just one of the characters. That way, when the inevitable millions start rolling in, we can make more movies about other characters -- we can have ourselves a franchise!"

"Oooh, and to help with that, we should dramatically limit the amount of fight scenes in the movie. Leave the audience wanting more and all that. That will guarantee that people will come back for the next movie!"

"Sure, but we should then focus on the background story of that character, because that's what fans of the fighting game really care about -- the motivations of the characters!"

"So should we hire a top-notch writer to flesh out a dramatic and gripping plot and backstory?"

"Pshaw! People don't care about that. Just go with some old standbys. Bad guy from the video game, does bad things to a father, kid comes back for revenge. Throw in an old, wise, somewhat mysterious mentor and a hotshot cop of the opposite sex for some tension. Done."

"Er... if the kid comes back for revenge and kills the bad guy, won't that cause problems for the future movies?"

"Nah, people won't even notice that. That's not why someone would watch a Street Fighter movie."

"So let me get this straight, we'll do a Street Fighter movie that doesn't feature many characters from the game at all, that has an incredibly flimsy, clichéd plot, and that only has a few fight scenes?"

"Yep."

"Sounds like a winner to me! Let's do it!"

Okay, it is entirely possible that I took a few liberties in that little dialogue, but I'm betting that I'm not too far off. So there it is. My best attempt at explaining the existence of this movie.

If you're still reading, and actually want more details (why?!), the movie is about the character Chun-Li (Kristen Kreuk), arguably the most popular of the fighters in the game Street Fighter 2. In order to get revenge against crime boss Bison (Neal McDonough) -- the end boss of the game -- for his treatment of her father, Chun-Li gets trained by Gen (Robin Shou, making his second appearance in a video-game series, after playing Liu-Kang in the Mortal Kombat movies), the aforementioned old, wise, mysterious mentor (who, as it turns out, is not a character from Street Fighter 2, but the original and much-less known original game) and fights her way through a couple of other "boss" characters (both from SFII), boxer Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and masked-clawed-dude Vega (Taboo, of the Black Eyed Peas) in order to confront Bison himself. Helping her out, sort of, are Interpol agent Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) -- based on another game character, sort of, referenced in SFII but not playable until later games -- and cop Maya (Moon Bloodgood, whose actual name is a much better Street Fighter character name), who isn't in the games at all and doesn't really have much of a point.

Did you follow all that? No? Doesn't matter. I think, in actuality, that the people behind this movie were attempting to make a more-realistic-less-cheesy Street Fighter movie, particularly when compared to the 1994 Jean Claude Van Damme... err... epic.

They failed.

It was a good idea, I suppose, but they still failed. The writing is bad, the acting is bad, the fight scenes are bad. I can't even say that it's "so bad it's good", 'cause I didn't find it that way. It's just there. Were you to watch it, you wouldn't be trying to find the nearest spoon with which to gouge out your eyes or anything, but you wouldn't really remember much about it afterwards.

Will there be future Street Fighter movies? I can't imagine as such when this one cost $50 million and made less than $10 million in the domestic box office. Kristen Kreuk actually left Smallville to make this movie -- and, okay, granted, she should have been written out of Smallville several years prior, as her character was by then more than pointless, but still -- so probably its only redeeming value in it is that she was able to get her guest role on Chuck afterwards, in which she was quite endearing. Watching Chuck is actually a very good way to spend your time -- unlike, in case you weren’t clear, watching this movie.

  -- K. Burtt