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253 comments in total

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44 out of 65 people found the following comment useful :-
Could've been worse. How, exactly, I'm not too sure., 25 December 2004

Author: SpeedRacer2K from Dallas, PA

Street Fighter (1994)

Director: Steven E. de Souza

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Wes Studi

Lord, I remember this movie. No, I didn't see it when it first came out, but I remember one scene from the trailer: Guile shouting "Now who's going home, and who's coming with me?" After that, I don't remember anything, and I heard the movie mentioned every occasionally on video game message boards. Then one day I found this in a $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart, and I figured that I couldn't lose.

This movie is based on the video game series of the same name by Capcom. The characters look like their video game counterparts, and I think that's pretty much where the similarities end. If you know anything about the video game series, it's sort of best to forget everything you know except that M. Bison is a bad guy and Guile is a good guy before watching this movie. However, if you're a really anal video game fan and you can't accept the fact that stuff has to be adapted to be made into a movie, you might as well never watch the movie. You will be disappointed.

The idea of the movie is this: General M. Bison (Raul Julia) is the ruler of the Asian country of Shadaloo, and he's recently taken a group of A.N. (Allied Nations, obviously the same thing as the U.N.) aid workers hostage. If the world does not agree to his terms within the next 72 hours, then the workers die. Thus, the A.N. Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) must go in, save the hostages, and beat the snot out of M. Bison.

The movie is corny, as I believe that it was intended to be. However, this isn't a very good excuse because when the movie tries to be serious, it's more laughable than the corny scenes. Raul Julia is perfect for the role of M. Bison, yet he also looks out of place at the same time. Perhaps it's because we're seeing two great actors (Raul Julia and Wes Studi) in a sea of B-movie actors and actresses. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is the worst film in the world; in fact, it's very enjoyable. It's one of those movies that you can just sit back and relax because everything done is by the book and done in a fairly entertaining way. It's one of those movies that you know it's bad, but it's a campy and fun sort of bad.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's performance as Colonel Guile makes some video gamers cringe because Guile is supposed to be the all-American Boy Scout, instead of, well, Van Damme. Van Damme's acting isn't the best, and the character suffers a bit because of this. He's given some nice lines, but Van Damme's acting ability doesn't make them stand out like they should.

As for the other actors and actresses, some are main characters, but you obviously couldn't care less about them. We aren't meant to care about them, since the attention is all focused on Guile and Bison. Even Guile's love interest(s) Chun-Li and Cammy aren't given much to do. It was somewhat nice to see how they tried to fit in the character's signature moves, although Ryu's moves look incredibly cheap and stupid.

All in all, this movie is hokey and fun, but in reality, it's stupid. It's nice that they tried to make it seem somewhat realistic, but in the end it seems more Saturday morning cartoonish than real. Leave your brain at the door and have some fun.

My rating for Street Fighter 1 ½ stars out of 4.

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32 out of 47 people found the following comment useful :-
NOT the worst movie ever - but not, 9 August 2002
Author: dtm666 from Montreal, QC

Some people claim this is a bad movie... true. Some people claim this movie is a bad translation of the video game it's supposed to be based on... true. Some people claim it's the worst ever... trust me, I've seen worse.

While it does have its Christmas list of bad things (poor script, ugly sets, subpar acting), it's good for a laugh or two because of the negatives... at the same time however, any dedicated fan of the Street Fighter games will find this as an insult because it does not properly adapt the video game...

Is it a bad movie? Sure it is... but I've seen my share of bad movies and I can tell that this isn't the absolute worst!

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39 out of 61 people found the following comment useful :-
Enjoyably silly, 11 November 1998
Author: Tito-8 from North Bay, Ontario

As a huge fan of the video game that is the basis for this movie, I felt compelled to watch it even though I have never been much of a Van Damme fan. To my surprise, I found this film to be a lot of fun. By action movie standards, the silly one-liners work pretty well, and it was fun to see the video game characters come to life, even if they did make a few changes to the basic plot of the game. All things considered, I'm glad I took the time to watch "Street Fighter". It's nothing memorable, but if you're in the mood to watch some silly action fluff, then I'd say that it's time well wasted.

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15 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Terrible, just terrible, 29 January 1999
Author: Wizard-8 from Victoria, BC

It's really dangerous to make a movie out of a video game, especially when the characters in the video game are cartoony. STREET FIGHTER is a terrible movie. The characters are a joke, and ACT like it's all a joke. The movie looks cheesy (study Bison's "hovering" command pod - it's obviously hooked to some kind of crane), and committing the famous Street Fighter martial arts movies into live action just looks stupid. What do you expect from DeSouza when the only things he directed before were a "Tales From The Crypt" episode and some shows of "Bowling For Dollars"? (No joke) Even the few Van Damme fans that are still left (after he's made countless bombs like this) will be embarrassed for their onscreen hero.

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17 out of 26 people found the following comment useful :-
A weird, horrible movie, 1 April 2005

Author: gnoxyz from Mexico

I have always been a huge fan of the Street Fighter series in video games. So when this movie came out I was really excited, of course I was way too young to appreciate a movie, but I can tell that back then I thought it was horrible.

A few years ago it was aired on TV and (I don't why) I saw it again. And I found it kind of funny. The story is all twisted if it gets compared with the video games story; I mean, in the video game, Ryu is the most important character and in the movie it is hardly seen. Cammy is a creation of Bison (in the video game), so she is part of the bad guys, while in the movie she is friend of Guile. A lot of intentional mistakes were made in order to transform what could be a good story into a useless-action-movie.

I hoped to see hadoukens and spinning kicks when I first saw the movie, but there is nothing of that. In other words, the movie sucks.

PS: Kylie Minogue, who played Cammy in the movie, declared later that she was completely sorry of shooting such a bad movie.

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12 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Vastly Underrated, 5 July 2005

Author: Bromhidrosis from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I really don't see why most everyone has a problem with this movie. The storyline is solid, and is, contrary to what most people believe, somewhat true to the story. Like it or not, Guile and Chun-Li are meant to be the main characters in SF2 and the movie reflects this. In the games, their endings are directly tied to Bison. Of the remaining 14 characters (obviously not counting Bison,) only one other is: Cammy's, and that's only because Bison tells her about her amnesia.

As for the casting, it was very well done. The only problems I saw/heard are Van-Damme's French accent, Dhalsim's casting as a doctor, which WAS well done despite being unfaithful to the game, T. Hawk's lack of height (I think Rainwater is shorter than Van-Damme) and Chapa's short hair. Otherwise, everything else was spot-on, especially the casting for Bison. Raul Julia is the only person that I think could've done it. He's a fairly versatile actor AND he looks like Bison. A couple other characters were miscasted like Dhalsim, but the excellent acting made up for that.

The combination of Charlie and Blanka was both acceptable and unacceptable. How? Street Fighter Alpha didn't come out until a year after this film did, but both Blanka's and Guile's endings disprove the combination.

Getting back to the story, it was actually believable for not being based around a tournament like SF2 is. Being forced into a three day timetable by Bison's ransom demands made the movie seem all the more action-packed, to me at least. The scene between Bison and Chun-Li in Bison's quarters could've been cut out, though, except for the part where Bison was about to get his butt kicked by Chun-Li. The final battle between Bison and Guile was the most blatantly choreographed yet still exciting thing I had ever seen in a martial arts movie up to that point, other than the odd scene from a few Jackie Chan movies.

The sound was pretty horrible. Generic rap somehow found its way into the movie in the cage fighting arena scene, and I swear I heard it again when I played the god-awful SF3: Third Strike. That one should've been permanently shelved. The orchestrated music that made it into the movie was nearly impossible to hear, although some of it was vaguely reminiscent of Guile's stage in SF2. The worst part was the lack of music from the game. A symphony orchestra doing all the music from the characters that made it into the movie (so no Fei-Long or Akuma) would've been great. So would have the Amiga CD32 version of Super Turbo if it was out or the arcade version of Super.

Many of the characters signature moves are not present. I counted one Hadouken (to Vega in the Ryu+Ken vs. Vega+Sagat fight in Bison's quarters, very easy to miss as it's done at point-blank range,) a few flash kicks (minus the special effect,) and one Psycho Crusher (I think that's the name.) No Sonic Boom, no Shoryuken, no anything else.

Overall, there are a few glaring issues (sound and lack of special moves mostly,) but it's still very enjoyable.

7/10

Recommended to: Martial arts fans Van-Damme fans Street Fighter fans

Not Recommended to: Street Fighter fans who believe Ryu and Ken are supposed to be the main characters without realizing only three endings out of sixteen people (not counting Bison and including Akuma) are actually tied to Bison himself.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Sucks, 16 February 2002
Author: MB092 from Undisclosed location

This movie is TERRIBLE. Van Damme give his worst performance. "Who wants to go home and who wants to go with me"? This movie is as entertaining as a 9 volt battery. This one is not worth it. This movie will probably be way cool if your a 6 or 7 year old. Too bad Raul Julias last movie had to suck so badly. They can't even say Ryu's name right for crying out loud. Street Fighter is about Ryu and Ken not Guile. Raul Julia did do a good job playing Bison though. That was the only part of this suck-fest worthwhile. This movie is totally opposite from the game except for the part about Bison trying to take over the world. This movie is a JOKE. So are the fight sequences. Never watch this movie.

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9 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
I perform the "Shun Goku Satsu" on this movie, 29 December 2004

Author: hancocka from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
The most underrated video game movie ever, 20 September 2005

Author: Comiccritic83 from Round Rock, Texas

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

9/20/2005

WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS! IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS MOVIE YET, PLEASE DON'T READ THIS REVIEW!

Still with me? Good.

"Street Fighter" is based off of the video game series of the same name, though it is more popularly known for "Street Fighter II" with its vast assortment of heroes and villains. The movie features the same characters from the game and three from another Street Fighter game. Instead of a World Warrior tournament of fighters like in the game, the movie focuses on General M. Bison (the late, talented Raul Julia) wanting world domination in pure James Bond villain style, with a vast secret hideout and dozens of henchmen. Bison has taken 63 hostages and demands 20 billion dollars to be given to him in three days for their return. Bison is also working on a super-soldier program (isn't that Captain America territory?), in which Dr. Dhalsim (Roshan Seth) is unwillingly mutating Guile's captured friend, Carlos Blanka (Robert Mammone), into a green-skinned, orange-haired man-beast (think orange Don King hair on the Hulk, but not as strong or muscular).

The Allied Forces are fighting Bison's troops and Colonel William Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose last name you still can't say out loud without muttering unintentional profanity), Bison's long-time nemesis, is determined to get them back. Guile makes a deal with two arrested smugglers, Ken Masters (Damian Chapa) and Ryu Hoshi (Byron Mann), to join the gang of Bison's main henchman, Victor Sagat (Wes Studi), to find Bison's hideout in exchange for their freedom and passports back home. The problem is, reporter and martial arts expert Chun Li Zang (Ming-Na Wen) is after Bison for murdering her father. Chun Li takes her film crew and fellow fighters, Balrog (Grand L. Bush) and Edmond Honda (Peter Tuiasosopo), to follow Ken and Ryu.

At Bison's fortress, Chun Li, Balrog and Honda are captured while the homing device Ken and Ryu have lead Guile to the hideout. With the aid of Cammy (Kylie Minogue), T-Hawk (Gregg Rainwater) and his soldiers, Guile invades the fortress and helps his friends save the hostages, while taking down Bison and his forces.

Well, except for Honda being a Hawaiian sumo, Balrog being a hero instead of one of Bison's evil henchmen, Zangief (Andrew Bryniarski) being a villain instead of a hero, Sagat not being a 7 foot tall tough fighter like the game, and other various changes, the actors do mostly resemble the video game characters and their looks. The movie actually improves on Ryu and Ken by making them more relatable. In the game, Ken is a wealthy, vicious and arrogant fighter, while Ryu has forsaken everything else in his life to perfect his fighting skills. In the movie, Ryu and Ken are the buddy team you see in every action film, but here it works. The two steal from criminals by selling them weapons that turn out to be bogus. Ryu is a straight-man with a conscience and will to help others without thought of profit, while Ken wants to be rich and has a wondering eye for good-looking single ladies.

The cast works well, particularly Minogue as Cammy, Van-Damme as Guile, Jay Tavare as Sagat's helper Vega, Wen as Chun Li, Studi as Sagat, Chapa as Ken, Mann as Ryu and, best of all, Julia as Bison. Bryniarski also does great as the not-so-smart, yet good hearted henchman Zangief who turns good by the end and he has the best laugh-out-loud moments (like when he realizes Dee Jay works for the evil Bison because of the paycheck, Zangief asks, "You got paid?").

The action works well and the fight scenes work well, especially Ken VS. Sagat, Ryu VS. Vega and Bison VS. Guile. But curiously, most don't have many memorable fights except with guards (like Balrog and Cammy), which is a shame, since so many opportunities for fights don't happen in the film. For example, Chun Li has a brief fight and awesome fight with Bison, but she doesn't fight any other villains except for Bison guards. Others, like Dhalsim, don't fight at all. And while it's nice to try and have an origin for Blanka, he's not as feral or muscular (or cool) as he is in the game, nor does he have any memorable fights, except in quick glimpses with - you guessed it, Bison guards.

Also, none of the characters have any special powers like in the game. It's a shame things like Ryu's fireball (which only happens in a brief flash of light in the fight against Vega), Ken's flaming fist when he uses his Dragon Punch move and Dhalsim's fire breath are all absent.

If you watch after the end credits, the film has an ending that sets up for a sequel (which, right now, is reportedly in the works). No matter what the public (or Street Fighter fans) think, I actually liked this film. It has good action, nice humor and good characterization. Is it disappointing? Sure. But is it good nonetheless? Of course.

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11 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
I'm a Hardcore Street Fighter Fan, and I enjoyed it., 6 March 2003

Author: True_BackLash from PA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

(WANING SPOILERS!!!!!!)

I don't know why people think this is a bad movie when actually it's not. It's story of Bison holding hostages for a ransom is not parallel to the Video Game's Story but that is something M. Bison would do. Also most of the characters did look like themselves or at least tried to (Ken was the only who didn't). The Humor by Dee Jay and Zangief was too good

ZANGEIF: QUICK CHANGE THE CHANNEL!

Captain Sawawda was an also welcomed addition to the Street Fighter franchise and I someday hope to see him in another SF related project. The acting was great and the action was unparalleled. My only complaint is they could have tried harder with the special moves. Other than that this was an awesome experience. 10/10

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