Movie Review Street Fighter The Legend of Chun Li

Street Fighter The Legend of Chun Li (2009) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by Justin Marks 

Starring Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neil McDonough, Robin Shou, Michael Clark Duncan

Release Date February 27th, 2009. 

Published February 28th, 2009.

Well, we’ve all seen career meltdowns off screen but how about witnessing a meltdown on screen? Chris Klein, best known for American Pie and Election does just that in Street Fighter Legend of Chun Li. As an Interpol agent, Klein delivers a performance of such goofball determination that his mere presence invites a giggle fit. 

Klein combines vocal affectation and exaggerated gesture to evoke something akin to a soap opera actor crossed with a community theater wannabe on top of the jocky persona that has been his calling card in his biggest role. You’ll recall he played the meathead jock with a big heart in election and the meathead jock who goes soft in American Pie. 

In Street Fighter he’s still a meathead but now a meathead with dramatic flair and an action heroes' sense of flair. Were there still a Mystery Science Theater this performance could go down in history as one of the great unintentionally hilarious roles in movie history. 

As for the rest of Street Fighter, villain Neal McDonough, one of those character actors whose name escapes you but his face you’ve a few hundred times, earns a few of the same derisive laughs that Klein does. For McDonough it’s a bizarre accent, part Irish part Cantonese? Vietnamese? Something with an eastern flair that just doesn’t jive with the Irish brogue. 

Michael Clarke Duncan is a long way away from the days when he was Oscar nominated for The Green Mile. He has become the go to beefy guy for beating people up. I can’t really say if there was another way for his career to play out but being an on-screen thug, the rest of his life doesn’t seem like the ideal career unless getting paid is your only motivation. I hope it was a really, really good paycheck. 

And finally star Kristen Kreuk. I am not a regular viewer of TV’s Smallville, but I’m told it’s a well-acted, complex superhero story and Kreuk’s Lana Lang is integral to the plot. She’s been in every episode. She likely wishes she had stayed in Smallville. Street Fighter may have given her; her very first leading role but the movie makes her look like a 12-year-old girl on steroids. The hair and makeup choices really truly make her look far younger than her 26 years. She makes Dakota Fanning look like Liz Taylor. 

That’s not a complement. The character is supposed to be in her mid-twenties. The look is distracting and unfortunate. 

As for the plot, hey, if director Andrzej Bartkowiak doesn’t care about the plot, why should we? Check out that final act and tell me what the bad guy's motive is? It’s a futile search because the script doesn’t supply one. It’s not really needed because the final act is really about fight choreography and some of the dopiest looking low budget effects this side of 1984’s The Last Dragon. At least that movie had a cool soundtrack. 

Movie Review: Cradle 2 the Grave

Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by John O'Brien 

Starring DMX, Jet Li, Anthony Anderson, Kelly Hu, Tom Arnold, Marc Dacascos, Gabrielle Union 

Release Date February 28th, 2003 

Published February 27th, 2003 

DMX has made it clear with the opening of his production company that the movie business isn't a hobby or a bandwagon-jumping fad. DMX the actor is dead serious about making a go of it in Hollywood. Unfortunately for DMX, Hollywood is not yet taking him seriously, sticking him with bad B-movie action scripts like the one he's saddled with in Cradle 2 the Grave, which, much like his last film Exit Wounds, casts him as the anti-hero with a heart of gold. It is a tiresome formula from which he will have a hard time.

In Cradle 2 the Grave, DMX is a diamond thief named Tony Fait who, along with his crew (including Anthony Anderson and Gabrielle Union) knock over a huge diamond vault in broad daylight. Unfortunately, they are being watched and followed by a shady Taiwanese law enforcement agent named Su (Jet Li). Just when it seems that the crew has pulled a successful heist, Su sends in the cops and Tony and company escape with only a fraction of their loot.

What they did get away with is a very valuable and mysterious bag of black diamonds. Having never seen anything like them before, Fait takes the diamond to a expert fence played by comedian Tom Arnold. Before the fence can find anything out about the diamonds, they are stolen by a rival gang headed up by Boston Public's Chi McBride. It gets worse. The original owners of the black diamonds, headed up by straight-to-video legend Mark Dacascos, want their diamonds back and take Fait's eight-year-old daughter in order to get Fait to give them what they want. (The child in danger plot is the hallmark of hack screenwriting.) Now, with nowhere to turn, Fait must team with Su to get his daughter and the diamonds, which are actually a powerful new terrorist weapon created by the Taiwanese government.

Director Adrzej Bartkowiak, who also helmed Exit Wounds, gives Cradle 2 the Gravea strong music video slickness that work well during the fight scenes, which are choreographed to the film's strong point, its soundtrack. If only the film were as entertaining as it is music. Unfortunately, it's not.

Still struggling with English, Li is given little to do when he isn't fighting bad guys. This puts the dramatic onus on DMX, who has a strong presence but is still a little too raw to be a leading man. The supporting cast is not bad; Union gives an especially strong accounting of herself showing off some kick-ass moves that she's never shown before. Anderson manages to keep his most annoying traits in check, though he is still somewhat grating, especially in the obviously improvised moments.

Poor Mark Dacascos is laughable as the villain. With his vapidity oozing over every sentence, Dacascos is one of least intimidating baddies in a long time. This guy is supposed to be a criminal mastermind; I doubt this guy could mastermind a convenience store robbery let alone negotiate an international arms deal. He, of course, is stuck with the film's most unintentionally chuckle-inducing moments when he addresses the world's foremost arms dealers by saying, "You are the world's most foremost arms dealers." Thanks for the plot update, genius.

Cradle 2 the Grave is yet another chase-scene, explosion, special-effect, action movie on auto-pilot. A film that had a cast and a poster before it had a script, Cradle 2 the Grave is a marketer's dream and an intelligent moviegoer's nightmare.

Movie Review: Doom

Doom (2005) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by David Callaham, Wesley Strick 

Starring Karl Urban, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Rosamund Pike 

Release Date October 21st, 2005 

Published October 22nd, 2005 

I am a huge fan of The Rock. The guy is charismatic, he's cool, he's big and surprisingly funny. That talent was on display in both of his previous roles in the action movies The Rundown and Walking Tall. So what happened to Doom?  Director Andrzej Bartkowiak somehow manages to strip The Rock of his charisma, his humor and any of his other appealing qualities for this human vs. aliens video game retread. Doom had little going for it when it was conceived. Take away the only really appealing element it had in Dwayne Johnson and you have one of the worst films of the year.

On Mars a futuristic research facility has sent out a distress signal of unknown origin. Scientists and archaeologists have disappeared and no one in the facility seems to know why. Enter the Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson) and his team of marine mercenaries. Sent to mars to find the missing scientists and help the corporation recover proprietary data, they soon find themselves up against an enemy that may or may not be human.

Hey wait... isn't that the plot for Resident Evil 2? Remove the trip to outer space and toss in Milla Jovovich in some skimpy ass-kicking outfit and you have essentially the same movie. There are even zombies in Doom and possibly, this point was not all that clear, a virus.

Funny thing, there were no zombies at all in the video game on which Doom is based. Of course there weren't any characters in the game either. Instead of The Sarge or Grimm (Karl Urban) or Destroyer (Deobia Oeparai) or the Kid (Al Weaver) you had the first person point of view of a gun that you used to blast alien monsters.

Creative license, I'm sure, was necessary for adapting Doom to the big screen but this departure is rather extreme and made worse by the fact that it's a near complete rip off of another bad video game adaptation. It's bad enough Hollywood studios cannot resist making video games into movies but do they have to make them knockoffs of other video game movies? UGH! 

We might have predicted the kind of disaster that is Doom considering the director. Polish born director Andrzej Bartkowiak, has the kind of resume that only Uwe Boll could envy. Bartkowiak directed two atrocious Jet Li flicks, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave and, most egregiously, he brought Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds to the big screen, a cinematic nightmare of incalculable proportions.

Consider ourselves lucky Bartkowiak did not include Mr. Seagal in Doom. The combination of this already bad idea with Seagal might have caused time and space to collapse upon itself in a cosmic gag reflex hurling us all into the ether. Sorry, I'm just saying maybe things could have been worse.

In a nod to gamers Doom retains the first person shooting scenario that is one of the games trademarks. Unfortunately, once we enter the first person mode, which happens for much of the last 20 minutes of the film, watching Doom becomes very much like watching someone else play a videogame and knowing you don't ever get a turn.

The one thing the film had going for it was The Rock. Sadly, cast as taciturn, humorless pseudo cyborg killing machine The Rock loses every last bit of the personality that made him a star. The action genre that The Rock has quickly risen to dominate, in terms of the classic one man against the world Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Van Damme action genre and not the genre as a whole, is built on physicality and personality. Removed from that mold Rock is just another beefcake behemoth with a gun.

Walking Tall was an old school action flick that played to the strengths of Rock's personality while being just different enough from the old school to seem fresh and fun. The Rundown is an out and out buddy comedy that really allowed Rock to cut loose with that fresh charismatic smile and surly but exciting demeanor that I had hoped would become his trademark. Doom is a major step backward for the man once known in the world of professional wrestling as 'the most electrifying man in sports entertainment'.

Just who is the audience for Doom? Teenage boys who loved the videogame might find something to enjoy. But even the least discerning teenage male must have his limit. Doom is an abysmal mess of genre knockoffs and an outright theft of another movies plot and action. And the movie it steals from, Resident Evil 2, isn't very good either so you can imagine how bad a knockoff would be. 

Throw another hack director into the movie marketplace. Andrzej Bartkowiak joins Uwe Boll and the king of all hacks Paul W.S Anderson in the ranks of directors dragging the standards of Hollywood filmmaking to new lows. Where is the justice? Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and other auteurs struggle to find financing for their work, often having to leave the country as Allen did for his latest film Match Point, to find the funding to make one small picture.

Hacks on the other hand are finding ever growing budgets and clout. I know Hollywood is a business but that does not make such practices right. Watch Doom and tell me you disagree.