Street Fighter (1994)

Plot Outline: M. Bison and his terrorist organisation is holding Allied Nation relief workers for ransom. Colonel William F. Guile leads his troops into battle against him, accompanied by a whole host of other people who want revenge against Bison or his cronies.

The Review: Another video game conversion and another disaster - will they ever learn? This is pretty bad stuff based on one of the biggest and most popular video games ever and even kids will probably see how bad it is. There is just so much wrong with this film its hard to pick somewhere to start. But I'll start with the acting, or lack of. The acting in this movie is an extremely mixed bag. On one hand you have Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue (in an action film?) who both can't act to save their lives. Van Damme can kick butt but unfortunately he's not doing that for a lot of the film so you've got to put up with his awful accent. But on the other hand, you have Raul Julia and Wes Studi who are both decent as the bad guys, hamming it up and sneering at everything to a sufficient level. This was Raul Julia's final film and he is pretty convincing as Bison so at least he goes out with a bang, even if he's let down by the rest of the cast. However if he was still alive, he would probably try and distance himself from this. The major problem (well, yes there are loads of problems) is that it contains practically every single major character from the video game. It's too many characters for a film and instead of picking out a few to focus on, we just get a little bit of development for each character. This is not enough and for most of the characters, you couldn't care less what happens to them. For fans and players of the video game, you wanted to watch the film to see how your favourite characters were portrayed. But everyone will be left disappointed because most of them are given little to do. This is supposed to be an action film and yes we are given plenty of it but lots of it is generic action set pieces such as a swarm of A.N. troops charging into battle with Bison's minions. Where is the one-on-one action we were hoping to see? There are some reasonable hand-to-hand fight scenes at the end between Bison and Guile and between Vega, Sagat, Ken and Ryu and are decent enough to resemble the video game. But it's too little too late.

Final Verdict: Street Fighter is yet another failed film version of a video game which just goes to prove that they don't work. Yes they may be great games to play. But stick to the games and leave the films well alone.

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