About that King of Fighters Movie…

Okay, as much as I’d have wished that THIS post was the April Fool’s joke and not the previous article, this is pretty much true. The King of Fighters movie is set for release in 2010, and already has a cast lined up; Sean Faris as Kyo Kusanagi, Will Yun Lee as Iori Yagami, Maggie Q as Mai Shiranui, Ray Park as Rugal Bernstein, Bernice Liu as Vice, Monique Ganderton as Mature, Francoise Yip as Chizuru, Hiro Kanagawa as Saisyu Kusanagi, David Leitch as Terry Bogard, Sam Hargrave as Ryo Sakazaki, and Kane Kosugi as K’.

Lots of Asian actors in the list (well, director Gordon Chan is Asian after all), as well as some vets of other game movies and chop-socky flicks (of course, Ray Park was Darth Maul and ubiquitous movie martial arts guy, while Kane Kosugi appeared in the DOA movie). Maggie Q.’s got the face of Mai, though probably boob-fans may find her a bit lacking for the role, but she can kick ass at least.

The plot seems more Mortal Kombat than KOF, with the champions of ancient fighting clans traversing various dimensions and battling otherworldy warriors as an evil force tries to invade the earth. Hmm… well, the SNK franchise is filled with mystic enemies and magic howdy-doody stuff, so that’s not entirely off the page… still… it’s hard to read the plot synopsis and not get a bit… antsy. Anyway, at 2010 release it’s still far off. Stuff like this tends to fade away and vanish without a word, like the Soulcalibur movie (and what’s on with the Tekken movie, as well?). So we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Or not.

Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Review/Rant

It’s not a question of whether it’s bad or not. It’s how bad.

Well. I certainly took one for the team tonight. I could have gone and watched Watchmen. But NOOOOOOOO… I had to go and watch Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. I told myself, it’s been a long week and I just want to turn my brain off with a fun but stupid action movie. Well, WRONG. This crapper isn’t even much of an action movie. It’s just plain stupid, for many reasons.

First off, let me give due respect to the much-flogged and ridiculed Streetfighter movie of Jean Claude Van-Damme and company. Today, we all see it as a hilarious camp-fest but with all it’s flaws, it’s freakin’ fun. And back then, in the late 90s, believe it or not, it was actually pretty cool. It had that effect on you- you’re a SF fan to the core, you watch it and you are freakin’ amazed that they actually got so much from the game on the film- it was ridiculous, really, but damn fun. I remember picking out the signature moves they threw in- Cammy’s Frankensteiner, Ryu’s one Hadoken, Ken’s Dragon Punch, Balrog’s Charging Punch, Honda’s Thousand Slaps… Guile’s Freakin’ Flash Kicks and Bison’s silly flameless Psycho Crusher. It was fun and damn I enjoyed it then, and I still have a laugh- albeit a good-natured laugh- everytime I see the flick on cable today.

And now… Streetfighter: Legend of Chun-Li. A movie that has none of the campy charm, fan service fun, cool action or the level of sheer spectacle of the previous movie. It’s just plain bad, people. So bad that probably people won’t remember this crapper years from now (which is a good thing). It’s so bad, it’s in the league of the Double Dragon and Mario Brothers movie in the levels of game-to-movie bombs. Pretty much everything is wrong with this stinker, I am a bit at a loss of where to begin.

Legend of Chun-Li follows the titular heroine’s ‘origin’ from her childhood, as a daughter of some rich, connected Chinese guy who practices wushu and kung fu in the garden. The childhood sequence drags for far too long, and for all that boring establishment we get an unnecessary action sequence with Balrog (Michael Clark-Duncan) bashing in to kidnap Chun’s father on the orders of Bison (Neal McDonough), a blonde guy with an Irish accent, whom you know is Eeh-vil since when he moves and turns there’s a properly sinister and Eeh-vil sound effect. Chun-Li sees her father getting taken away and vows revenge, right? Nope. She just goes on with her life and grows up into Kristin Kreuk. I guess that night wasn’t that motivating. More dragging minutes go by. Yawn.

Chun-Li FINALLY gets off her piano-playing butt when a mysterious scroll (Chun-Li: This scroll… could it be a message..?”) arrives and has her go on a sort of trip of discovery. NOTE: The freakin’ version shown in the theater has NO SUBTITLES in the MANY scenes where they speak all Chinese or Thai, which is just stupid. Anyway, apparently the scroll tells Chun-Li that she must leave her old life behind and find some guy named Gen to find her true destiny. Man, what a very dense and easy-to-manipulate girl. Just send her a scroll and she’s all over the place killing herself. Anyway…

She dismisses her servants and leaves her family home to go all Lonely Planet backpacking in Bangkok, and wastes quite a lot more dragging time trying to find the mysterious Gen. Meanwhile, we find out that Bison is planning something BIG. After taking total control of his Shadaloo organization, Bison is planning to TAKE OVER ALL OF BANGKOK’S SLUMS. Well, it’s not exactly world domination, but it’s early in his career, right? FEH. Once again, there’s far too much of Bison scaring public officials to do him favors, forcing Chun’s dad to work his connections and having ol’ faithful Balrog go here and there as his private gopher.
Trying to find Bison is Interpol agent Charlie Nash (Chris Kline) whose performance is indeed as BAD as they say. The guy is acting like a bad impression of Jim Carrey doing a bad Keanu Reeves action hero cliche skit for the whole movie. Backing Nash up is the sexy cop Maya (Moon Bloodgood) who is supposedly based on Crimson Viper (yeah, right).

Anyway, eventually Chun finds Gen (Robin Shou), who starts teaching her the way of The Force, via really bad CG fireballs. As they do, Chun sneaks out every so often to tangle with Shadaloo (which she finds out all about after reading two newspaper articles on the internet… man, you can find everything on the web but that’s ridiculous) and beat up bad guys. She even tussles with Cantana, Bison’s secretary/female aide in a pretty unnecessary lesbian mating dance that just comes out of nowhere (so apparently Cantana’s sexual preferences were also common knowledge on the Internet) and is just another tacky nail in this film’s coffin.

We learn that Bison was the orphaned son of Irish Missionaries (which shows that accents are ingrained in the genes) who grew up a thief in the streets of Bangkok and became the seemingly-invincible super crime boss he is today by killing his pregnant wife in some cave.

WHAT. THE. HELL. Raul Julia’s M. Bison was way classier than this. My gosh. Let me say that I was willing to let a lot of things slide with ‘Bison’ in this film. I accepted that we wouldn’t be seeing the military outfit, the metal shin guards or any of his signature fighting moves. But damn, we never really get a sense that this was going to become the fearsome M. Bison. Psycho power is reduced to ‘having no conscience’? Man, ANYONE can do that. You don’t even need to go to a weird cave in Thailand. Just be a politician here in Manila.

So everything just kinda-sorta-somehow works it’s way to some kind of endgame. Chun-Li gets captured and reunited with Dad, sees Dad get killed by Bison, escapes and then participates in the final assault on Bison’s lair with Nash and Gen.

Oh, and sometime before that, she beats up what is probably the most pathetically incompetent incarnation of Vega EVER (Taboo from Black-Eyed Peas) and Balrog apparently gets killed by Gen in a bad kinda-fight scene. All with Balrog never ever showing any sign that he was a boxer. Or that Vega was ever a graceful, deadly elite ninja-like assassin. No, they just get fragged, so basically Bison is all alone with some nameless, nothing guards in the film’s action FINALE.

Finale? There’s nothing really to the movie’s wrap-up, just lots of silly brawling and bad wirework, some crap about Bison’s daughter (who is supposed to be important in some way) and lots of sneaking and tumbling around. You know there’s something wrong about the movie’s ‘action-packed’ finale when the coolest guy onscreen isn’t Chun-Li or Nash, but the lone SWAT guy backing them up. Un-freakin-believable.

Anyway, Chun-Li hits Bison with a Kikouken fireball and a neck snap, and it’s over. So… why the hell was Bison so hard to take out in the first place? That was pretty easy. I mean, what made him special? Well, I guess we’ll never know.

We then have a little mention of a ‘Streetfighter’ tournament and a guy named Ryu-something. Sequel? Do I smell sequel???

Oh by all that’s holy NO.

I have to say, the one big sin of this Streetfighter movie is, well… it’s NOT a Streetfighter movie. It’s a revenge-drama flick with martial arts overtones, but not Streetfighter. All the appearing characters who are supposedly based on SF characters pretty much never measure up to the source material. Liberties be damned- if you’re gonna make a movie entitled Streetfighter then work the the hell hard to get it to live up to that name. Make some freakin’ effort to get the characters recognizable or at least having a faint shadow of who they are supposed to be.
Let me say this- Michael Clark-Duncan is, despite being a black guy, totally miscast (the guy in the Van Damme movie got the look and feel down perfect, in contrast, aside from the change that he was a good guy). Everyone is pretty much miscast, save for Robin Shou who could have at least had dressed like the ‘real’ Gen and had some of his fighting style.

But really, it’s a movie about Chun-Li. WHY CAN’T THEY AT LEAST GET CHUN-LI TO KINDA-SORTA LOOK LIKE CHUN-LI??? I’ll accept they can’t use the blue outfit, the spiked bracelets, fine. But at least give her those trademark hair buns. The buns ARE Chun-Li. They’re not impossible to do. They don’t need prosthetics. They don’t need CG. They’re freakin’ cutely-tied up hair. WHY THE HELL NOT?

Even the freakin Chun-Li action sequence from Jacky Chan’s City Hunter is better than this whole movie. You could retitle this “The Schoolgirl” and it would probably work better. Or “Stand Up to Fight” if you wanna follow the style of the old Hong Kong action films of the 80s and 90s.

With all that, needless to say I didn’t like this movie.

It’s badly written, badly directed, badly shot and badly performed. There are no cool moments, no set-piece encounters to speak of worth remembering. Low production values are just another hit to a movie that is humorless and joyless, not fun, not enjoyable and frequently dragging. Action sequences are rarely good (mainly just the ‘practice’ scenes are kinda neat) and for the most part are clunky, ugly and just plain bad- the DOA movie kicks this one’s butt at least in terms of fighting. You can just tell, there was no love for Streetfighter, no reverence or even respect for the material, in the makers of this film. I wonder just what the hell went into Capcom’s minds when they allowed their property to be defaced or connected with this crap.

It would have been better if I said I didn’t like this movie because it’s been so long and I just am not that big a SF fan anymore. Or that the Van Damme movie is just so much better (it is, actually). Or that I am just a lot older and wiser now, so am immune to blind fanboy wonder when I see any film of a franchise I like taped on the cover. Nope… it’s just that Streetfighter: Legend of Chun-Li is a very, very bad movie.

Wanna see Chun-Li done right? Watch the old Streetfighter II the Animated Movie. Or the Streetfighter: Ties that Bind anime loaded in with Streetfighter IV. Or Streetfighter The Later Years from College Humor. Just. Not. This.

Streetfighter: Legend of Chun Li ‘Walkthrough’

Kotaku just posted a liveblogging article about the new Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun Li movie, and it’s pretty hilarious. Naturally, it’s full of spoilers and basically runs through the movie… but what the heck. This isn’t The Sixth Sense. It’s a freakin’ Chun Li movie.

Go check out Kotaku’s SF Movie Liveblogging.

Man, after reading that… now I really want to see the movie. WAHAHA!

Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun Li Clips

Streetfighter IV’s arrived and in players’ consoles, but the SF movie, The Legend of Chun Li, is still on the way… a movie that has not been allowed by the studio to be screened by critics… hmmm. Maybe they know something we don’t? Anyway, here are several clips from the movie to help us decide perhaps whether we’re gonna watch this or not.

Okay… Bison doesn’t do a Psycho Crusher, but when he fights there are weird sound effects, so that’s kinda cool. Chun Li kicks butt in the fights, and against some pretty ladies, which is good. I find the new portrayal of Vega pretty crappy though… mask and claw are just half of Vega, he’s also vain (for a reason) and the most balletic and insidiously deadly of the Shadaloo fighters… how come Chun kicks his ass the first time they meet? The animalistic grunting is also waaaaay off and pretty stupid sounding.

In any case, the movie looks action-packed, so I’ll probably venture a bit and say I’ll give this a shot. Maybe.

Musing About Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

… looks interesting. I’ll give it that. An english version of the trailer was released recently, and it looks suitably slick. But then, well-edited trailers are NOT indicative of the finished film, ever. Cliffhanger taught me that.

Anyway, Kristin Kreuk is Chun-Li… I’m not uncomfortable with it, she’s hot, she looks like she can pass off in the fight scenes, let’s give her a chance (even if I really, really, realy wanted a Zhang Ziyi in this role).

Neal McDonough’s M. Bison perplexes me. He’s a blonde guy in a suit, looking NOTHING like the uniformed, military-looking, levitating super-villain. However, this IS supposed to be a ‘prequel’ type thing showing off the characters as they were before the time of the ‘regular’ Streetfighter 2 story. I am intrigued at who this guy is, if what they’ve written for him and done will indeed be the seed of this saga’s master villain. Take it this way- he’s supposed to someday become Raul Julia’s Bison. Hmmm. Anyway, it’s an unusual casting choice and they’ve clearly gone another way with the character. We’ll see.

Michael Clark-Duncan as Balrog. Okay.

Taboo as Vega. The mask and claws look cool. The thing with Vega is, you can pretty much put anyone behind that mask, just let them go wild with stunts, they’ll be awesome. That’s the mystique of this guy. A bigger-budget thing would have used Ray Park (but then, he’s probably busy), but we’ll see. I really don’t know how a member of the Black-Eyed Peas got into this role, but we’ll see.

Colin Chou as Gen. Colin’s awesome and has that martial arts master look and feel everywhere he goes- he was the coolest thing in the DOA movie, even if he looked, acted or felt NOTHING like Hayate. He should be pretty awesome.

From the look of the casting details, it doesn’t look like many other SF-ers will be appearing aside from Bison and company. Ryu and Ken will NOT be in (along with Sagat). Charlie Nash will probably DIE. Heheh.

Whether or not SFLOCL turns out to be awesome probably won’t affect how the actual SFIV game is accepted by gamers this February. But it should be something to look forward to by gamers who call themselves Streetfighter fans.

One Year Later: Soulcalibur Movie Update

It’s been about a year since I first posted this pic… and yep, Siegfried here still looks mighty pissed.

I have to say… I’m a bit surprised by how a lot of readers seem to be reading my old post about the Soulcalibur movie. Well, I guess with all that attention I should do an update on this game-to-movie adaptation.

Well, the thing is, there’s nothing to update. Apart from some guys posting stuff on my comments about this or that snippet about the movie’s script or whatever… there’s NOTHING on the Soulcalibur film. Look at the movie’s official website, and there’s nothing but a short flash movie that’s mostly text from Nostradamus… and the film’s projected year of release… 2007.

2007. The movie’s now more than a year overdue. The latest game in the series, Soulcalibur IV, has been out for months. We surely won’t be seeing anything new from the franchise for at least a couple of years, what with Namco-Bandai obviously concentrating on the upcoming Tekken game AND movie.

So… is the movie still coming, or has it vanished into the mists of antiquity? I’d say the latter, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised. I’d love to suddenly be presented with a trailer or a teaser for the flick, but up to now, there’s only been glimpses of character CG stills, and one poster. And a now totally-outdated and bare webpage.

Let’s move on people. More high-profile, seemingly in-the-bag game movies have also gone poof. Time to look to other, newer things. The Tekken movie is on the horizon. Heheh…

Best Cutscene Ever: Resident Evil Degeneration Review

It’s been a long time coming, but something finally happened which gamers have been clamoring for- a game-based CG movie actually made by the company who does the game. No, I don’t consider Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, since really they should have just chopped off the FF from the title of that pretty but vapid stinker.

Capcom-produced using graphics pretty much ripped from the games (but loads better since the PS2 days), Resident Evil Degeneration is a full-length CG action film based on the best-selling survival-horror videogames. The flick reunites popular RE heroes Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, two of the few survivors of the original Raccoon City incident that first introduced the zombifying T-virus to the world. Taking off from his appearance in RE4, Leon is a special agent answering directly to the White House, dedicated to wiping out threats of bio-terrorism from the face of the earth. Claire, on the other hand, is affiliated with an NGO named Terra-Save that works against pharmaceutical companies that have risen up after the fall of Umbrella some years before. Once again, both Playables’ paths meet in a busy airport which soon becomes a zombie wasteland. But zombies and super-mutants aren’t the only things making trouble- shadowy politics and some behind-the-scenes manipulations are seeking to cover up this new incident yet again.

Well, what can I say? RED is pretty cool. Story-wise, the flick is fast-paced with few lulls that make you wanna press the fast forward button. The story is smart, but sometimes gets a bit too much into the conspiracy angle, and a little bit too much on the melodrama sometimes.

In terms of graphics, the whole film doesn’t quite match up to Pixar or even Dreamworks’ film standards- animations are for the most part realistic, but lack that feeling of life, of unique character and personality quirks. Faces are all of the uncanny-valley blank staring types which you never really get over for most of the movie. Leon has about ONE stoic expression for the whole movie- whether he’s staring down a zombie or looking ‘lovingly’ into a hot new love interest eyes, his face is always the same. Was David Duchovny used as the mo-cap model? Anyway, for the most part, faces aren’t the most expressive in terms of emotion.

That said, everything looks pretty slick and consistent- you just don’t find yourself investing too much into the cast as you’d do in something like The Incredibles or Toy Story. I just found too many parts set in the dark too much and for too long. Once again, it all looks like a very high quality game cutscene (with me expecting any moment for in-game playable portions to fade in), but once you accept that, it should be smooth viewing from there.

Voice work is decent, just very anime-ish. No big-name stars on the cast but they all pretty much do their job well (perhaps any faults lie with the writing, not the performances). Sound effects though are a mixed bag- explosions and gunshots are fine and dandy, but stuff like the characters’ footsteps are a bit too similar to the games… why does everyone seem to have feet that weigh fifty pounds?

Anyway, Resident Evil fans would do well to enjoy this film the most, as they’ll be the ones most attuned to this world, setting, characters and scenario. It does plug up some holes or mysteries in the series’ saga, and it’s great to see Claire and Leon in action… and there is quite a lot of action in the movie’s hour and a half. Quite a bit of CG blood flows as well, which should please monster/zombie buffs. Will anyone not much into Resident Evil get the movie? It’s not rocket science or a particularly complex movie, so why not?

Even though it’s far from perfect, I give RED a good thumbs up. I totally prefer this type of game-to-movie port rather than most crappy live-action attempts. Hopefully this actually gets more game companies to do animated CG movies more, and in that, Resident Evil Degeneration should be totally supported by every red-blooded gamer.

The Lone Gamer gives Resident Evil: Degeneration Three Severed Limbs out of Five. Though it never really strays far from being the longest Resident Evil cutscene ever, at least it IS the best Resident Evil cutscene ever. Fans of the RE franchise should watch this and enjoy it, particularly in the light of being the only canonical, in-world film translation of the RE series.

Streetfighter: Legend of Chun-Li Trailer

Here’s the Japanese trailer to the upcoming new Streetfighter movie. The film stars Kristin Kreuk as a young Chun Li getting ready to become a videogame legend. Also in the movie are Michael Clark-Duncan as Balrog, Taboo from the Black-eyed Peas as Vega and Neal McDonough as M. Bison (who looks nothing like Raul Julia’s version). What can I say? It looks interesting, and I guess Capcom’s all behind it given how the title font they’re using is the same as with Streetfighter IV. Looks like the movie and the game are coming in hand-and-hand in late February, for better or worse.

Degeneration Degenerated

Resident Evil: Degeneration, the all-CG Resident Evil movie, looks cool. I mean, any RE fan would be thrilled to have Claire and Leon back together again and kicking zombie ass. But man… seeing the recent clips posted online have kinda dampened my fervor. I mean, the whole thing has the look and sound of a game cutscene, instead of a high quality movie. This would have been awesome a couple of years ago… but now… well… I’d say that anyone going into this had better lower their expectations. Not sure I’d get this on Blu-Ray or anything, but I’ll probably check it out. Eventually…

Max Payne is in Manila

I noticed from today’s newspaper that Max Payne, the movie adaptation of the bullet-time 3rd person shooter starring Mark Wahlberg, is already showing in Metro Manila theaters. I was never a fan of the games, but the trailers intrigued me. I mean, what the heck are angels or demons doing in this hard-boiled action flick? Anyway, the visuals look slick, Wahlberg is a pretty good action star, and I know enough about the game to know it has tons of stuff I’d enjoy- namely sex and violence, in over-the-top cinematic glam. I’ll be sure to catch this within the week, and put up a review as soon as i can.