Kristin Kreuk, who has spent plenty of time kicking butt as Lana Lang on the CW's Smallville, recently signed on for a chance to beat up bad guys on the big screen.  She'll be playing the titular martial-arts warrior in the film Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which is based on the popular video game franchise.  If the film sounds like a piece of late 1980s nostalgia that could be because the screenplay was written by Justin Marks, who has also scripted upcoming films based on Masters of the Universe and Voltron.  Whether this is a cinematic masterpiece in the making or a surefire sign of the apocalypse is up to you to decide.

Fans of the Street Fighter series will surely remember the 1994 film based on the games, which featured Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and the late Raul Julia as M. Bison.  In that version, future ER star Ming Na played Chun-Li.  The character originally became popular for being the first playable female in a one on one fighting game, and while she's fairly one dimensional in the games, she is known to be the world's strongest woman.  Kreuk doesn't really strike me as the strongest woman in the world, but considering all they can do with wire-fu these days it probably doesn't matter.

Unlike the original film, which featured Guile as the main character, this version will focus heavily on Kreuk's Chun-Li and her path to becoming a legendary fighter.  The movie promises to be more centered on the characters and the story, as opposed to the 1994 version that had a somewhat ridiculous plot.  However, action will certainly be plentiful, as will lots of martial-arts madness.

The movie is set to be directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak who, to put it nicely, has a terrible track record.  He previously directed Doom, also based on a video game, as well as Cradle 2 the Grave and Romeo Must Die. This does not bode well for the quality of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Variety
(Image courtesy of the CW)