Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Soundtrack) by Stephen Endelman - Review

Score-yukan!
Review by Christopher Coleman

It has been a while since composer STEPHEN ENDELMAN has visited the action-genre, but he seems to be in a bit of an action-run at the moment. With last year's RED BELT and upcoming STREETS OF BLOOD, Endelman slides in his score for STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN LI. After the 1994 effort, STREET FIGHTER, starring the one and only Jean Claude Van Damme, I didn't think there'd be another attempt at movie-izing this classic game franchise...at least not in this generation. Yet Capcom decided to let Hollywood give it another whack. With their release of STREET FIGHTER IV for the Xbox 360 in February 2009, if there was going to be another release of a Street Fighter film, that time would be the time. Unfortunately, the video game was given a much better reception by critics and fans than this film. It was at least an interesting effort to focus on the backstory of Chun-Li as opposed to Ken or Ryu and to try to give the film some measure of real-worldliness as opposed to the cartoonish 1994 edition. It's not called THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI for nothing, but in the process of learning about the popular female character, we also find out a bit about other famous STREET FIGHTER characters such as, the film's nemesis, Bison, his henchman, Balrog, and Vega. Perhaps 15 years later and a ton of lessons learned from unsuccessful game to film crossovers would make this attempt a marginal success at least. That was my hope, but alas, yet another game-to-film production falls into the pit of discard. However, we, lucky few, who dare to listen past the dialogue, might find some intriguing moments in the original score by STEPHEN ENDELMAN.


Read the full review of STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI here