Now there have been several attempts over the years to make Street Fighter into a movie, this one is noteworthy for being the first and also unfortunately being the final performance of the late great Raul Julia beause it's pretty awful. I'll grant you that Street Fighter is not the easiest thing to adapt well but the basic structure is easy. The heroes (presumably Ryu, Ken, Chun Li and Guile) enter a shady fighting tournament run by M. Bison in the mysterious city of Shadaloo in order to take him down all with their own motives for doing so. See, not that hard. Hell it's essentially the plot of Mortal Kombat, probably still the best video game movie ever made (yeah that's not saying much).
Instead what we get is a ton of nonsense about Bison being an evil warlord who takes hostages and All American hero Guile (played by Jean Claude Van Damme because why not) coming after him. Instead of a British agent, Chun Li is a reporter. Her crew is E. Honda & Balrog (what?), Dhalsim is a scientist (huh?), Zangief is one of Bison's cronies as is Dee Jay. Ryu & Ken are con men who look nothing like their video game counterparts(sure why not). As you can see this movie was doomed from the start by changing a lot of things that didn't need to be changed and making the plot a hell of a lot more complex than it needed to be. To be fair, a couple things make sense-Sagat as a crime boss and Cammy as Guile's second in command for instance, but it's rare. Also, Guile may be the worst Commander ever. He routinely doles out important information (i.e. yelling out on camera to his buddy Charlie that they are coming to rescue him, so know Bison knows he has Charlie and specifically picks him out to experiment on) and when he finally goes after Bison he leaves the base completely unguarded. A joke is made of it but I'm pretty sure he'd be court martialed for that. Of course the acting is awful, with Raul Julia the only one really making a go of it.
But much like Double Dragon, the real disappointment is in the awful action. There actually is not a ton of fighting in the movie, more gunplay than anything else but the actual hand-to-and combat scenes are barely fights with awful choreography. I haven't watched any other Street Fighter adaptations yet, but I'm hoping this is the worst because it was pretty painful to sit through.
That's all for today like I said I should hopefully have something up Thursday or Friday talking about the games I've played over the last week or so. Until then, happy new year.
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