Movie Review by Pete Tutton: Street Fighter

Let’s be honest. Street Fighter II could never have been made into a good movie. I don’t care if Martin Scorsese and Steven Speilberg had a three way with Peter Jackson while James Cameron gently touched himself in the corner, the resulting love child could not make compelling cinema out of this video game title.

    First of all, there is no plot. It’s people fighting each other. There’s a countdown timer, a damage bar, some people pumping their fists in the background. Nothing of substance. No princess to rescue, no world to save, no alien race to vanquish. I guess there’s a tournament to be won or something. Buttons were mashed, feelings were hurt, shoryukins were thrown but in the end, Street Fighter is just a fighting game with lots of characters.
    Street Fighter the movie lives up the example set by the video game by having no plot. OK it does have a plot but it’s pretty sketchy. Bison, played with wide-eyed fury by the late Raul Julia is some kind of warlord who has taken over the fictional Far East burg of Shadaloo City, or Yabba Dabba Doo City, or Sha Na Na City. I forget. It doesn’t matter. It’s up to the AN to take him and his storm trooper goon squad out of business. Don’t let their powder blue uniforms fool you, this is the AN. Not the UN. Waaaaaaay different. This is that other multinational peace keeping force. Is the UN copy righted? Will they sue you for using their name? I guess so.
    All of your favorite characters from the game are in this thing. Chun Li, played by Mulan, is a reporter with some hidden kung fu skills. Guile, played by the unintelligible force of nature known as JCVD, is a colonel in the AN leading the offensive against Bison. And boy howdy, is it offensive. Let’s just say, there’s a stealth boat. More on that later.
    Sagat is played by an eye-patch-ed Wes Studi, the guy who has gotten 90% of all Native American roles for the last 20 years. He Tiger Uppercuts no one. He’s some kind of gangster and Vega is his love slave. Oh yeah. Vega spends much of the movie literally up Sagat’s ass. He swings his braided pony tail around with major sass-itude. You go girl with your adamantium claws. 3 snikts up in a Z-formation. Mmmm Hmmm!
    Ken and Ryu are a couple of thieves who get tapped to infiltrate Bison’s crew. They are portrayed by a pair of martial artists so bland, they make Affleck look like Brando. And they don’t have the ability to shoot stuff out of their fists. Weak!
    There’s an Indian scientist who I think is supposed to be Dhalsim. I wasn’t playing close enough attention but he didn’t once utter the phrase “Yoga flame” so I could be wrong. He’s doing Bison’s evil bidding against his will by trying to turn Guile’s buddy Charlie Blanka into an evil super soldier. We know this because he’s held captive in a box with tv-goggles strapped to his face playing a loop of violent imagery to turn him eeeeeeevil! Every once in a while there’s a voice that announces to all the scientist in the room that “the subject’s muscle mass has increased by 51%.” Five seconds later it informs us that “the subject’s muscle mass has increased by 52%.” If I were a scientist, which I’m not, I think that would get annoying after about 9%. At one point, Dhalsim manages to flip the evil video footage over to footage of babies and flowers so Blanka doesn’t turn into a complete dick. There’s even a gauge in the room measuring his evil levels. Thank God Dhalsim was able to keep that bad boy from reaching 100%. After emerging from the evil box, Blanka looked like Mickey Rourke as an evil clown. He’s covered not with blue fur, but with beefy facial prosthetics and a big red wig.
    The Russian guy is there too, so is the Mike Tyson rip off boxer. E. Honda is a former sumo on Chun Li’s action news team. Cammy is played by singing non-actress Kylie Minogue. She’s huge in the UK for some reason. Did she sing The Locomotion? I don’t know, I’m not British. My favorite character in the whole film is not a game character at all but a Japanese AN soldier with a tenuous grasp on the English language. He addresses Col. Guile as Coll-o-nell. He pauses in inappropriate times mid sentence. He’s a national treasure. In Japan. Where he knows the language. He should stay there.
    Now to that stealth boat. Let’s think about this practically. Do we need to make the boat invisible to radar? Probably not. Not so sure that Bison is using radar to monitor the rivers of Yabba Dabba Doo City to check for marauding boats. So the assault commences, Guile, Cammy and Japanese guy are all up in a boat, speeding toward the fortress. Stealth mode gets activated and the boat goes all invisible. Not invisible to radar, invisible to eyeballs. That’s cloaking, people. Not stealth. Watch Star Trek some time. Bison switches on his video surveillance and what does he see? The wake of an invisible boat shooting rockets and shit. Aim at the waves! There may or may not be an invisible boat causing them!
This movie was written and directed not by Uwe Boll, but by Steven E. DeSouza, writer of Die Hard, Commando and The Running Man. DIE HARD! On the other hand, he also wrote Die Hard 2. And the Flintsones. But come on, man, Die Hard. That’s a fucking good movie. Yippie ka yay motherfucker! Awesome. Classic shit.
In closing, Street Fighter based on the Capcom video game Street Fighter II is a shit movie. But there’s a stealth boat. So there’s that.