Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li: * 1/2 (out of 4)

I learned something today. I learned that, in order to become evil, you just have to kill your wife. Poof! You're evil, and you have magical evil superpowers! Involving kicking.

Seriously, that's what I got out of this movie.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is nominally a spin-off of the famous video game series. Oddly, it doesn't actually have much to do with the video game, except that there are a few characters of similar names, and there's a nifty Capcom-game montage opening thingie. Instead, we follow the life of young Chun-Li, a Smallville actress that grows up to be a concert pianist after her father is violently kidnapped in front of her. Eventually she receives a scroll, and some other people show up and tell her to go to Bangkok, where she will learn things. Then kicking ensues.

Really, I can't write a whole lot more about the plot than that. It didn't make any sense, not even internally. This was a movie that was supposed to involve street fighting; instead, we got an Evil Real Estate Scheme, and a few Street Fighter characters. The acting was bad, but not horrible; the fight scenes were pretty bad, and we didn't even get all of Chun-Li's signature moves. The plot didn't even try to resolve itself. And, worse, I didn't even come out of it laughing at how bad it was. If it had been truly bad, I would have been happier.

I have seen worse movies, but still. Avoid.

* 1/2