If you’d asked general audiences back in 2010 if Street Fighter would ever get a proper on-screen adaptation, they’d probably have laughed in your face. The 1990s gave us Steven E. de Souza’s critically reviled attempt starring Jean-Claude Van Damme (although, depending on who you ask, it’s become something of a camp cult classic at this point), and 2009 gave us a frequent entry in many “Worst Of All Time” lists with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li starring Smallville alum Kristen Kreuk as the titular martial artist. While Hollywood was figuring out how exactly to approach video games on the big screen, Street Fighter languished as a result of being a cinematic experiment not once, but twice.
However, it’s been 17 years since The Legend of Chun-Li released, and in that time Hollywood has realized that the easiest way to appeal to video game fans is by just…giving them the game on-screen, an effect that isn’t always a recipe for quality but is more often than not a recipe for making millions of dollars (look no further than this year’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie or indie-success Iron Lung). Enter Street Fighter, a movie that doesn’t have all that much going on under the hood but also doesn’t try to outsmart the franchise, simply ripping the characters from the arcade cabinet and allowing audiences to watch them do battle the same way they would in-game. Not only is it the best film based on the franchise by a country mile, but it’s also a movie extremely confident in its own sequel potential (something SF fans would have thought impossible ten years ago), evidenced by the movie’s surprisingly abrupt cliffhanger ending.
