Street Fighter - Just don't take it too seriously 

Streetfighter 2 - the arcade so popular, it reinvented one-on-one beat-`em-ups. It was only natural that Hollywood was going to try and cash in on it. However, as Mario Bros found out, making a movie out of a (pretty plotless) video game is no easy task.

First of all, let me say that Streetfighter the Movie is rubbish. Secondly, let me say that I loved it.

There was no story to the arcade, so the film's writers were always going to have to take a hell of a load of creative licenses to try and gel it all together in some form of narrative format (after all, how much story can you get into sixteen people from around the world knocking the hell out of each other?). And, I think they did a pretty good job - at least with the story anyway. It follows - mainly - the film's biggest star Jean Claude Van Damme, As Colonel Guile, who leads an A.N. (that's `Allied Nations' - think United Nations, but with a different name) task force of soldiers against the warlord dictator of (made-up country) Shadaloo, namely M. Bison. The `Mussels From Brussels' is joined (and hindered) by almost all the other main Streetfighters (not that any fighting is ever done in any street, but never mind...).

Unfortunately, what the film does well in coming up with a coherent and (nearly) believable story, it lacks in what fans want to see. Sadly, none of the actors are particularly good. There are too many characters and none of them are given enough screen time to particularly develop their characters. Plus many of them don't really look much like their on-screen counterparts. Not only that, but their computer-generated incarnations are also better at delivering their lines. The actors' dialogue is pretty clunky and cringeworthy. However, all this could be forgiven if the fight scenes were better. Okay, so it was released a few years before The Matrix redefined martial arts battles, but the fights are more similar to old James Bond fights where people just roll around on the floor a bit. The `special moves' taken from the arcade are pretty hard to spot and, despite having a pretty big budget (for 1994), it makes you wonder where it was spent.

So Streetfighter is a pretty bad film. And I still love it. Maybe because as a teen I played the arcade, or maybe because Kylie looks pretty hot as Cammy. It's camp, it's stupid, it's mainly for die hard fans of the arcade. If it ever finds a new audience, it will probably be with twelve-year-old boys as they would find it pretty much action-packed and exciting.

The Matrix it is not. Stupid fun it just might get away with, even if Mortal Kombat is actually a better film.

Don't be too harsh on it - at least Raul Julia gives one hell of a cape-swishing performance in his last ever on-screen role.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that