Shortly after the beginning of the disastrous Street Fighter movie, we see the words "Based on the Capcom game Street Fighter" displayed. How ironic, then, that the movie following is anything but. For a movie that purports to be based on one of the most well-known arcade games of all time, the Street Fighter movie does not so much tell the story of the game as it does rape, butcher, and mangle it into an unrecognizable form. The Mortal Kombat adaptation, while certainly not being a cinematic masterpiece, at least stayed relatively faithful to the games.
Somewhere along the line in this parade of broken lives and shattered dreams, someone decided that the tournament-based, Enter the Dragon-like storyline of the game would never fly with the American movie-going public. And so it was rewritten, becoming a typical American action flick, with plenty of huge explosions, loud gunfights, and thinly veiled right-wing propaganda. A Japanese protagonist? That will never do. Why not cast the Belgian Jean Claude Van Damme as the American Guile, and have him become the main character? It's not as if fans of the game are going to mind, are they?
Street Fighter the movie is a catastrophe. Every character, bar none, from the games is butchered and rewritten beyond recognition. Chun Li, played perhaps the only well-casted actor in this dreck, Ming Na Wen, has become a mere reporter (with a smirking Balrog and a Hawaiian shirted E. Honda as her camera crew, natch) instead of a detective, Ryu and Ken are incompetent gun smugglers, and Jimmy/Blanka and Charles/Nash become the same person in one of the most laughably absurd plot contrivances ever thought up. There are so many incongruities between this movie and the game that it becomes difficult to tell if they are merely the result of the incompetence of the writers, or their actual intent. For example, were the writers (whom I hope are begging for change at bus stop right about now) aware that "Shadaloo" was merely the name of M. Bison's organization, and not the name of a fictitious South Asian country? (which conveniently rests atop present-day Myanmar?) Or were they simply not paying close enough attention to the game's storyline? Who knows?
Consider the most egregious example of the screenwriters' disdain for the source material: M. Bison walks into his laboratory and addresses one of the scientists there as "Doctor Dhalsim." Was Dhalsim a doctor in the game? Do we ever see him fight in this movie? Do we ever see him using his remarkably elastic limbs? The answer to all these questions, of course, is no. The writer's simply drop in a character named "Dhalsim" just for the sake of saying they included him. The movie's failing is in its desperation to include every single character to the detriment of the rest of the film. I can only imagine what Akuma would have looked like had the writers decided to include him.
Anyone who played through Street Fighter knows that each character had at least one defining personality trait. Ryu was the stoic martial artist seeking to become a true warrior, his friend Ken was brash and arrogant, Vega was obsessed with beauty, Sagat wanted revenge on Ryu for scarring his chest, etc. It should come as no surprise that none of these traits appear in any shape, form or fashion in this movie, and in the rare moment that a character DOES act like their game counterpart, it's more often the result some sort of lame contrivance than a scripted personality trait. Chun Li's cameraman Balrog only happens to box. When Ryu and Ken and "inducted" into M. Bison's army, the uniforms they wear just happen to resemble the white and red karate gis they wore in the game. To top it all off, M. Bison gives a lengthy explanation of how his "magnetic levitation" that allows him to perform the movie's equivalent of the Psycho Crusher. It's as if the screenwriters set out to make a completely different movie, and were only told halfway through that it was supposed to be a Street Fighter movie.
Which brings me to my next point; there's little actual "street fighting", giving fans of the games precious little to chew on through the movie's running length. Whatever fight scenes we get are brief and unexciting, and are nothing next to other martial arts movies. Instead we get Jean Claude Van Damme running from scene to scene, spewing out pithy one-liner after one-liner, gleefully trampling any remaining source material that hasn't already been butchered. Only Raul Julia and Ming Na Wen come through with any dignity left; they apparently realized what a turkey this film was and at least tried to have some fun with their roles. Their noble efforts, however, are sunk by the awful screenplay, which should be an example to future filmmakers of how NOT to adapt a video game to the big screen.
As an aside note, there was actually an arcade game made of this movie. Yes, it was terrible, too.
