Lost in Translation? – Street Fighter

Welcome to Lost in Translation? – the Ready Up series where we look at the rocky two-way road of media adapted from video games and games based on films and TV shows, in a bid to decide whether the juice was worth the squeeze, or if what made the source material great in the first place got lost in translation.

For the first installment of LIT? we’re going to take a look at one of the first ever live action game-to-film adaptations – and one of the most infamous – Street Fighter.

Released Stateside in 1994 and making its way to UK shores in 1995, Street Fighter sonic boomed its way onto the silver screen shortly after the arcade debut of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the fifth and definitive game of the Street Fighter II series… if you don’t count 2008’s HD Remix edition. Street Fighter II is a game about a fighting tournament, the entrants of which are capable of unleashing spectacular attacks. Each combatant has their own motivation for fighting and their own individual goal achieved by being crowned the tournament champion.

Also marking his directorial debut, Street Fighter was written by Steven de Souza, then best known for penning one-liner-heavy Arnie classics Commando (1985) and The Running Man (1987) along with both Die Hard (1988) and its follow-up. On top of this the film starred Jean-Claude Van Damme at the height of his split-kicking popularity, meaning the pedigree and the potential was in place for a decent (albeit cheesy) action flick that would appeal to Street Fighter fans, with just the right amount of self-knowing humour to still appeal to the mainstream.

Street Fighter tells the story of Colonel Guile as he builds up to and leads an all-out assault on evil dictator M. Bison’s base in a bid to rescue a bus full of hostages and stop the madman once and for all. Between Guile and Bison’s verbal sparring over a TV news show at the film’s start (seriously) and their more physical fisticuffs at the film’s end, we meet news reporter Chun-Li, whose grudge against Bison stems back to her youth, and cheeky conmen chancers Ryu and Ken, who just can’t stop getting into mischief. Oh, the cads!

What it got right

While it’s very easy to be overly hard on Street Fighter, there are a couple of things the film did get right… in its own ‘God loves a trier’ kind of way, at the very least. For a start the movie managed to feature 15 out of SSFIIT’s 16 playable characters, with only Fei Long not making the cut, replaced instead by ‘Captain Sawada’, and no mention of then-secret character Akuma, because presumably de Souza’s research didn’t extend that far. In addition to the headcount, each character in the film had at least a passing resemblance to their namesake by the time the credits rolled – despite the movie E. Honda being Hawaiian instead of Japanese.

Perhaps Street Fighter’s single biggest success though was this scene in particular, with Bison responding to Chun-Li’s explanation of just why she hates him so much:

What it got wrong

But even with one of the most memorable ‘day of the week’ quips ever to grace the silver screen, my goodness, Street Fighter got a lot wrong. Putting aside the scenery-chewing hamminess, the relative sparsity of actual fight scenes, the characters’ not-so-special moves, and the ‘is it trying to be serious or is it a piss-take?’ tone of the film, the film’s biggest faux pas was to more or less entirely neglect the (admittedly wafer-thin) narrative of its source material, not even managing to reflect some of the franchise’s fundamentals.

By ignoring or radically changing the majority of the game characters’ motivations, we ended up with only Guile and Chun-Li in any way recognisable to fans of the game, with franchise poster-boy Ryu stripped of his philosophical outlook and reduced to a comic relief side character.

On top of straying from fan expectations, as a movie in its own right the film suffers from the sheer number of characters vying for screen time, which sees any character development delivered via angst-ridden expositional speeches (a la Chun-Li) or simply not even attempted, funnily enough rendering most characters less dimensional than their 2D inspiration.

However, even with its significant flaws, if watched with tongue-firmly-in-cheek, ideally with friends and at least a little alcohol, the film manages to fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp, its silliness and cheap façade deserving of a watch so long as you’re a fan of the games. Should you wish to find out for yourself, Street Fighter is currently available to legally stream for free via Crackle, viewable through a web browser or the Xbox 360 Crackle app.

The Verdict

Without a doubt – lost in translation. Worlds apart from its source material, but daft enough to carry a bizarre sort of charm, Street Fighter is just about watchable if considered a strange kids film. If a decent, faithful adaptation of Street Fighter is what you seek, then get your hands on the 1994 Street Fighter II anime movie instead.