Street Fighter Movie Trailer Debuts Online

Here it is – the first Japanese trailer for the Street Fighter movie nobody wanted, The Legend of Chun Li. It’s hard to discern much from this footage, besides the fact that M. Bison is sporting a beard and Balrog is armed with a rocket launcher to make up for his limited repertoire of punches. As for plot details, we see Chun Li learning her patented “Kikouken” fireball and running away from dudes decked out in SWAT gear. Besides that, I’m not seeing much here that would justify the planned theatrical release on February 27^th, 2009 (as opposed to a quiet, direct-to-DVD launch).

The movie is directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, the man responsible for 2005’s cinematic atrocity, Doom. Actress Kristin Kreuk stars as Chun Li and Neal McDonough hopefully hams it up as Bison. Supporting players Michael Clarke Duncan, Taboo, Chris Klein, Moon Bloodgood, Edmund Chen, Cheng Pei Pei, Josie Ho, and Robin Shou will also be collecting paychecks.

My apologies if it seems I’m being too snarky, but it’s hard to have high hopes given the state of other live-action video game movies in production. Even if Street Fighter’s script somehow surpasses expectations, it looks like production company Hyde Park kept the budget fairly low. Again, all we see here is an explosion and a few kicks to the face, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed when Fox releases the movie in the States next year. It can’t possible be worse than the legendarily terrible Jean-Claude Van Damme fiasco, right?