Street Fighter

There is a general rule that has existed since Super Mario Bros. flopped monumentally and was critically mauled that 'you can't make a decent movie by adapting a video game'.  There have been a couple of films that just about manage to stick their heads above water (Silent Hill; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) but most have sunk without trace, and a good thing too.  The intrinsic problem is that video games depend on viewer participation - you're not just watching the screen, you are actively influencing what happens on screen.  If you're sitting (or standing in the case of an arcade) next to someone who's playing, you can still have input by offering advice and pointing out things that they may not have seen.  When the story and characters are taken out of this medium and put into a predetermined set of plot points and interact according to how the screenwriter has said they should, all you can do is watch.
 
Capcom had massive success with Street Fighter II (1991) which expanded the four characters from Street Fighter (1987) to sixteen and with much better gameplay and more levels.  The characters included a sumo wrestler, a boxer, a Chinese kung fu artist, a green creature with orange hair and two mixed martial arts practitioners with M. Bison as the boss.
 

 
In 1994, Steven de Souza helmed a live action film with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue as the stars.  If this wasn't enough to send shock waves around the industry, de Souza designed the film as a campy reflexive parody of itself with Van Damme as Colonel Guile leading an Allied Nations (AN) force (they couldn't get clearance from the United Nations to use the UN in the film; they didn't need to but Capcom apparently insisted they write and ask for permission) against deranged Colonel M. Bison who has installed himself in Shadaloo as a dictator.
 
The film shoehorns all sixteen characters into the plot with Chun-Li as an undercover television reporter who wants revenge for Bison's murder of her father, Balrog and E. Honda as her assistants, Cammy as Guile's loyal lieutenant, Sagat as Shadaloo's crime boss, Vega as one of his cage fighters, Ken and Ryu are there doing something, but I couldn't tell you what, perhaps sightseeing? and Blanka as a captured AN soldier and Guile's best friend who is being turned into a super-soldier by an imprisoned doctor on the orders of Bison.
 

 
Trying to keep track of who's who and why they're there is practically an exercise in futility and, besides, the whole film is so terribly written and acted that you really don't care!  De Sousa was one of the screenwriters on Die Hard but any idea that his talent led to a decent film must surely be thrown out of the window when you see what garbage he writes for a film he himself directs.
 
It has been a long time since I last saw this and it will be an even longer time until I see it again.
 

The Disc

 
Extra Features
In the commentary, Steven de Sousa is full of praise for his film, saying that those who said it wasn't violent enough missed the point because it was designed for a PG-13 audience; those who said it was too silly didn't realise it was a self-parody and the critic who called him an 'idiot' for having an invisible boat that you could see was taking it too seriously.  That critic had a point and any director looking back on this with any degree of objectivity must realise what a terrible film it is and any pride in the acting is woefully misplaced.
 
Aside from the commentary, there is a five-minute 'Making Of' which is really just an EPK promotional piece with complimentary soundbites from members of the crew, especially Van Damme.  There are also deleted scenes, both of them, and trailers for the then-upcoming Street Fighter III game (one for the game, one anime-style) plus a pointless tribute gallery and trailers for Hancock and You Don't Mess With The Zohan.
 

 
The Picture
Amazingly, the visuals are very good, standing up to Blu-ray standards with high levels of clarity, good colours and contrast and excellent skin tones.  The (intentionally) ridiculous costumes are fitting for a stupid parodic film and even the set designs are pretty good, especially for M. Bison's lair, full of his own logo and ridiculous artwork.  On the flipside, Blanka should be a huge, savage, gorilla-sized creature but in this he looks like a budget Incredible Hulk with a ridiculous orange wig and laughable prosthetics on his face that are similar to Lon Chaney's Hunchback of Notre Dame! 
 
*The pictures contained in this review are for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect the image quality of the disc.*
 
The Sound
A suitably bombastic Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack which is much louder than any others I've come across and the final sequence with fights all over the place and myriad explosions is very loud and even allows the dialogue to be clear amongst the mayhem.
 
There are also TrueHD soundtracks in Spanish and French plus myriad subtitling options for both the film and commentary, something SPHE tend to do very well.
 

 
Final Thoughts
Street Fighter is a terrible movie.  No ifs, no buts, no maybes - it's rubbish.  From the casting to the screenplay to the direction, there isn't a single aspect of this film deserving of praise.  In a multitude of errors, the one that really sticks out is having the 'Muscles from Brussels' playing an all-American colonel with the stars and stripes tattooed on his bicep but speaking with a fairly thick European accent.  Kylie Minogue was obviously in it because she was a name, not for her thespian talents which are virtually non-existent and the only actor who seems to have done anything with themselves after this is Ming-Na who I last saw in Michael Mann's Miami Vice.
 
If you regard this as a camp classic then this disc will possibly be of interest but, for everyone else, you will either ignore it completely (the wise course of action) or watch it only out of morbid curiosity.  You have been warned.