Street Fighter |
  • Japan / USA • 1994 • 102m •   • Directed by: Steven E. de Souza. • Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Damian Chapa, Kylie Minogue, Simon Callow, Byron Mann, Roshan Seth, Andrew Bryniarski, Grand L. Bush, Robert Mammone, Miguel A. Núñez Jr., Gregg Rainwater. • Music by: Graeme Revell.      Col. William Guile leads an army of soldiers into the country of Shadaloo to find traces to lead him to General M. Bison, who has captured many people including three missing soldiers. Among them is Carlos "Charlie" Blanka, in which Bison decides to turn into a hideous mutant. On the other hand, Chun Li is a reporter who seeks revenge against Bison for the death of her father years ago. Then two small time hustlers Ryu and Ken, are arrested along with Sagat, a powerful arms dealer and Vega for dealing of illegal weapons. Guile recruits them in order to find Bison's base. Now Guile, T. Hawk, Cammy, Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Balrog and E. Honda have three days before Bison murders the hostages and takes over the world.
|
Trailers:
| Length: | Languages: | Subtitles: |
Review:
As usual with videogame adaptions (especially fighting game ones), one shouldn't really expect anything of earth-shattering levels. Most of us will be satisfied just to see the characters from the games fleshed out on the screen and strutting their stuff for a bit. Well, not so here. There's some kind of silly plot going on about rescuing a bunch of hostages from flipped dictator wannabe M. Bison. Oh well, any excuse would be good enough to have the characters from the games appear and beat each other up, but the movie starts to do everything frighteningly wrong almost right from the start.
Primo, some bright spark decided that almost all the characters had to be completely changed from their game selves. I'm all for originality, but this just ends up looking embarassing. The grim and mighty Sagat from the games turns into a dopey-looking smuggler of sorts, Ryu and Ken are cast as bunch of semi-outlaw ruffians instead of the worthy warriors we know (also note that the Yank actors don't even know how to pronounce Ryu's name. If I was called Ryu, I'd slap the face of someone who called me "Rai-yoo"), and it goes on and on. To fans of the game, a lot of this will seem terribly clumsy, if not downright insulting to the characters they know and love. Beefy Russian Zangief was never a faithful servant of Bison's, and neither was Dee Jay (Balrog the boxer has also changed sides suddenly and is one of the goodies...and a news reporter at that). The whole shebang just seems like a total mess, thrown together after just playing the game for two minutes. The way Blanka and Dahlsim were turned into complete farces speaks volumes.
It's doubly painful to see how shoddy this has become when you consider how easily all these mistakes could've been avoided. Unlike a number of other game adaptions, there is some simple, yet solid base material for a film to be found in the Street Fighter games. The movie could've taken on a more linear path, describing a big martial arts tournament just like in the games, where everyone has their own (sometimes slim) reasons for competing and taking on Bison. It would perhaps have been unoriginal, in a Bloodsport-on-acid kind of way (side note; Bloodsport actually reminds one much more of the Street Fighter games than this film, with a "world warrior" flavor clearly present in there), but at least it would've done it's job of turning a game into a film properly.
The way it is now, the character's names and costumes are the only slight similiarities to the games (plus a few teeny-tiny references). Overall it's just a messy and corny film, that's more like a trippy action movie for young children rather than a film based on the games. It doesn't even resemble a martial arts movie very much. Sure, there are fight scenes, but they're not quite Bruce Lee (Fei Long is missing from the movie, by the way), and are hampered by cheesy lines and dumb hampering around. Most of the action you get here would feel more at home in a standard "run around and blow everything up" kind of film. This is not so much a Street Fighter movie as just a forgettable actionwarfare film on caffeine.
Although the cast features some big names, one really has to wonder who came up with the bright idea of casting Raul Julia as a flipped dictator (who's even supposed to be a grandissimo martial artist. No, seriously). It's nice to see Van Damme again, though the day-glo yellow rinse they did for his hair won't go down well with everyone. And seriously, if you're going to star him in a film, at least have him strip off large amounts of kit at some point.
In a nutshell, this is a travesty. The film fails miserably at everything it tries to do. Still, at least there's an anime version of the game (several ones, in fact) that does a more faithful and overall far better job, I'm told. Just goes to show you that Japanese games are better off being adapted by Japanese studios. Or studios who have some kind of clue, for that matter.
Review by vkn from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database