I realize that there have been a lot of pointless remakes lately, but now we’re just getting ridiculous. That’s not to say that the original Street Fighter film released in 1994 was close to perfection, but compared to this mess it’s No Country For Old Men. How do you know when your action movie’s gone off the rails? How about when the key action sequences are outright laughable, not because of their preposterousness but because of how they were staged. Another sign? How about when they call your film “Street Fighter” and there’s actually very little fighting in the street? Whatever. When it’s this bad, you don’t sweat the small stuff.

I’m not sure how closely the film follows accepted Street Fighter “mythology,” all I know is the plot for the first film and that there’s good and bad characters in the original Capcom arcade game. This film focuses on Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) who grows from piano prodigy to master brawler in order to find her long-since missing father (Edmund Chen). The culprit is M. Bison (Neal McDonough), who’s working on some bizarre Lex Luthor-like real estate scam where he’s going to plough over the slums in Bangkok and build a gaudy monstrosity of glass and steel, not caring for all the little people. And why is Bison such a jerk? It’s because he gave all his good feelings to his unborn daughter in some kind of bizarre cave ritual, of course.

Believe me, seeing it in the film is somehow even dumber than that last sentence sounds. But yet this simple plot point is not nearly as bad as the entire treatment of Bison, who in the game is a big, street thug in a red cape and shoulder pads. And say what you want about the late, great Raul Julia – who was by no means par with Bison’s typical physicality – but he knew how to camp it up and chew the scenery. He knew what time it was, and he hit it in every scene. As for McDonough, I don’t know what he was supposed to be. You have M. Bison wearing thousand dollar suits and throwing his weight around in the board room, but there’s no street-level brawling. Had the makers ever seen a Street Fighter video game?

But McDonough with his supposedly Irish, really vaguely Euro-trash accent isn’t the only hole in this boat. Smallville fans will be pleased to know that Kreuk can change franchises and still not act her way out of a wet-paper bag. So much of the narrative depends on her voice over, but what’s meant to be empowering and/or emotional is just a steady drone of a poor-me whine that grates because when I walk into a film called Street Fighter I want to see street fights. And then when they finally get around to a fight scene, I’ve got to say, I wasn’t very convinced. And when you don’t have Kreuk’s sad eye mopping you Chris Klein’s pathetic attempts to capture John Wayne-style gristle, complete with a throaty voice inflection to make him sound like a grown-up. This would be adorable, if I couldn’t make out wrinkles and grey hairs on his face.

If there was one pleasant addition to the whole experience, it was the appearance of Robin Shou as Chun-Li’s wise, old master Gen. I’m forced to wonder though how much of that has to do with the in-joke of seeing the Mortal Kombat franchise’s Liu Kang slip into a part in the filmed version of the competing fighting franchise. But Shou gets a premium for adding some sense of dignity to this affair, and he ably demonstrates that he’s much more sharp and spry than many of his younger co-stars. But in the end, I question why this was made, and I question why this was made so badly and so ridiculously. It’s silly, it’s stupid, it’s lame, and it makes the whole idea of “shutting off one’s brain” at the cinema seem like an act of appeasement. It should of gone direct-to-DVD, and I expect to see it there soon.