1994’s “Street Fighter” represents the mentality of pretty much every studio head. Just throw a bunch of crap on screen and hope the audience doesn’t notice the movie sucks. In this instance “Street Fighter” throws a lot of the characters from the Street Fighter games on-screen and hopes no one notices that the movie is really damn awful. We noticed. Trust me. We noticed. Even at eleven years old I couldn’t understand why this was so bad while the games were so incredible.
Worst of all, the games never had much of a plot line to begin with. The characters have back stories, but back story doesn’t equate to a plot for a feature film. Either focus on one character or don’t make the movie at all. Wait… “Legend of Chun-Li.” You know what? Forget the former statement. Don’t make this movie at all. Just stop trying to bring “Street Fighter” to the big screen. Let’s face it, to make this series remotely watchable, you have to turn the characters in to somewhat realistic individuals, and to do that you have to avoid the inherent goofiness of the series. General audiences won’t want to watch a movie about a green monster fighting karate, or an Indian man stretching his arms to fight someone. And they certainly won’t care about a hero with mushroom cloud shaped blond hair.
It’s just too over the top for a live action film. A video game? Sure, anything goes in a video game or comic book or book, but film is literal, it’s quick. You don’t have time to provide exposition for everyone on screen all the time. And with 1994’s “Street Fighter” it doesn’t try. Look there’s Cammie! And Blanka! And Thunder Hawk! Dee Jay! Back story? What back story? Who needs a back story when your favorite video game characters are on screen, you kill joy? To make things worse, the most popular characters of the game are nothing but mere side characters. Ryu and Ken are nothing more than footnotes in the larger scheme of the film’s premise.
They have almost nothing to do here, and when they’re on-screen they goofballs with mildly impressive powers. All the while Raul Julia is ill-fitted as Bison who is teamed against the ill-cast Van Damme as Colonel Guile. The film desperately tries to convince us Guile is an all-American soldier, while sporting a Belgium accent. Ming-Na as Chun-Li has little to do as well, and should be playing off of Guile, but the film jumps back and forth and has little concern with telling a story. The key element is having our favorite characters fighting, if only for a moment. And “Street Fighter” obliges, even at the cost of pacing or story. Who cares if it fits in the story? We have to see E. Honda fight Zangief.
Why do we even need so many characters appearing in one film? Why not boil it down to four characters, build a competent narrative, and then introduce many more characters in the sequels? Steve E. de Souza’s adaptation takes the game too literally, and feels like a goofy episode of “Power Rangers” never once delivering interesting characters or respectable martial arts sequences. It’s an unwatchable farce from beginning to end. Hollywood should stop trying to tap video games as a source for film franchises. It just doesn’t work.