Kristin Kreuk, best known as Clark Kent's girlfriend, Lana Lang, on Smallville, stars in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, which opens at multiplexes nationwide today. The movie should come as a breakthrough for high school video gamers who have been trying to figure out how to get that cute girl from English to go to the movies with them. She likes Smallville. You like the way Chun Li's miniskirt rides up her thigh when she does this high kicks. I think that counts as a mutual interest. You could try it. Just thank me later.

In the film's title role, Kreuk plays an accomplished concert pianist who studied the martial arts as a child under a master sensei she liked to call dad. But her dad was kidnapped by M. Bison, the crime lord of the covert empire Shadaloo. When she grows up Chun Li finds The Order of the Web. You know the type: Luke Skywalker and the crew of the Millennium Falcon, She-Ra and the Great Rebellion. They want to bring down the dictator and restore peace to all the people of the land. Chris Klein, best known for playing cute but stupid jocks in movies like American Pie and Election, graduates from junior roles to play an agent on a more legal crusade against Bison. He would presumably be the character who usually says “Don't kill him, Chun Li. You're better than that. Make him truly pay for killing your father by putting him in an O.J. Simpson trial instead.” M. Bison does wear a glove and, well, you know what his legal defense would be.

In an interview with Coming Soon, Kreuk explains why she takes this acting role so seriously. “I think it's really important, at least in this story, to be earnest with the characters because you want people to relate to them while they go through the movie. I think it's really important that the fighting is really good. You want to be able to root for the individual and that means the character has got to be relatable in some way. If they're really over the top, it's harder to relate to them in this style of a movie. If it was something else, I think it would be different.”

For the counterpoint I turn to MSNBC reviewer Alonso Duralde. “Not only is the acting consistently ludicrous — with some performances falling into the laugh-out-loud embarrassing category — and the script flimsy, but the hand-to-hand combat fails to generate any adrenaline whatsoever.” Well, you didn't really expect film critics to get the movie, did you?

As for those action scenes, Kreuk sort of backpedals. Also in Coming Soon she says, “I only got seven hours to really practice that stuff on Smallville which is nothing and five weeks even feels like nothing for what we did. Doing wires well isn't easy and I think all the hand to hand stuff is challenging as well but the wirework, to make it look good and natural, it's a whole different way of figuring out how to make your body move. I learned so much more on this than on Smallville where I only got bits and pieces of it. Normally with Smallville I get the choreography and they're like, ‘Okay, action!'”

In the end moviegoers will make the call. An unconnected movie based on the same source material, Street Fighter starring Jean Claude Van Dam, Raul Julia and Kylie Monague, was released in 1994. That movie had an opening weekend take of $6.85 million dollars and finished with a domestic gross of $33.42 million. That movie cost $35 million to make. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, which also stars Neal McDonough (the veteran TV actor from Boomtown, Tin Man and Band of Brothers) and Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile,) cost $50 million. It goes head to head with returning box office champion Medea Goes to Jail and Crossing Over, a political drama about immigration opening this week starring Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd. Oh yeah, and a new movie starring some total unknowns Smallville fans couldn't possibly be interested in. The Jonas Brothers.



-Henry Jenkins, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of 20th Century FOX)