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Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

• Directed by Andrzej BartkowiakWritten by Justin Marks
• Starring: Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein and Neal McDonough
• Rating:

Though it springs from grubby mid-eighties video arcade roots, the movie Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-L is a disappointingly sanctimonious affair about father-daughter loyalties, inner peace and how to hurl glowing purple balls of mystical energy at your enemies. Unfathomably, this is the third movie adaptation of the 22-year-old kick-and-punch arcade game, including an animated film in 1993 and, a year later, the live action Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The current movie is released in conjunction with the Xbox and PlayStation 3game, Street Fighter IV, and judged as a 90-minute commercial it succeeds. Watching the movie, you can't help wishing you had some buttons to press.

In a voice-over prologue, we learn that our heroine, Chun-Li (the delicately pretty Vancouver actress Kristin Kreuk) is raised by her computer-hacker father to be a concert pianist with a sideline in martial arts. Life is blissful until, one night, a gang of ninjas kidnaps Chun-Li's father. The kidnappers are led by the muscular, guffawing Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and a foppish blond Irish crime boss, Bison ( Desperate Housewives' Neal McDonough).

Years later, the grown-up Chun-Li, now a famous pianist, learns from an ancient scroll that she should go to Bangkok and meet a man named Gen. She leaves hurriedly, without cash or credit cards, to live on the city's streets. One night, when she is attacked by hoodlums, she awakens her martial-arts skills in a blur of CGI effects and rapid editing. At this point, the long-haired martial-arts master Gen (Robin Shou) makes himself known to her and becomes her guru, teaching her to catch ricocheting ball bearings while blindfolded, to control her anger and summon the purple balls of power.

Their goal is to save Chun-Li's father and thwart Bison's evil urban-renewal scheme to turn Bangkok's slums into fancy real estate. At this point, screenwriter Justin Marks brings in a couple of other miscellaneous characters. Taboo, of the band Black Eyed Peas, has a gratuitous cameo as a masked ninja. Chris Klein ( American Pie), sporting bad hair and a worse drawl, plays a sleazy American Interpol agent who is paired with a flirtatious detective, Maya (Maxim model Moon Bloodgood), to help Chun-Li's mission.

A couple of sequences in Street Fighter edge into fertile exploitation territory, including an improvised cesarean birth in a dark cave and a lesbian-themed fight in a women's washroom that Quentin Tarantinomight applaud.

But there's not much else here that's likely to please even the most fixated action fan. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak's fight scenes are choppy and sloppy, and the acting is even more chaotic. In her Lara Croft-lite role, Kreuk ( Smallville) is low-key to a fault. In contrast, co-stars Chris Klein and McDonough, cut loose from the basic demands of realism, chew scenery in a way that's more painful than any of the movie's kicks and punches.