On Sunday, Baroque and I had stopped by the local Best Buy to see if there was anything we needed in their games section. We picked up a couple of titles each, and then, as we were heading to the registers, we saw it. Street Fighter: The Movie. It was $6.99, which I assured Baroque was too much for that movie, as I had managed to sit though the whole thing years ago when it first came to video. He had never seen all of it, so he picked it up and after playing a bunch of Super Castlevania IV, we got a couple of sandwiches and settled down to watch the sucker.
Oh. My. God. I remembered it being bad, but it was so... it was worse... it was just beyond any ability to describe. It was like that morning after a drinking binge, where you wake up, and as you start to become aware of the world, the pain and discomfort begin. Just when you think you've reached the limit, that nothing could feel worse, it keeps going, showing you new definitions of misery that you had never thought could exist.
It wasn't enough for it to just be awful, either--it had to be confusing, as well. As we stared at the screen, appalled, but helpless to turn away, like witnesses to a train derailment, one of us would occasionally make a futile appeal to logic, to try and apply some sense of sanity or reason to what we were seeing.
Baroque: "Why is Sagat Native American?"
Me: "I... don't know."
Baroque: "Wait, forget that--why is Wes Studi in this movie at all?
He was right. What was a talented actor doing anywhere this thing? And he wasn't the only one, either--Simon Callow was in it, and Raul Julia. Raul Julia! He did Shakespeare, for god's sake!
Why... why was there no fighting in Street Fighter: The Movie? I mean, even forgetting about the games it was supposed to be based on (which everyone in this movie obviously did), doesn't the name alone suggest that there would be fighting? Possibly in the street? But aside from an extremely weak 3 or 4 minutes with Guile and M. Bison and a pathetic excuse for a hurricane kick from Ryu (pronounced almost universally in the movie as RYE-YOO), there was pretty much no action of any sort. Did they think the movie was going to make it on its dialogue?
I checked IMDB, just to see if Uwe Boll had anything to do with this travesty, but he wasn't mentioned. The screenwriter/director, though, was one Steven de Souza, who also gave us such treasures of American Cinema as Hudson Hawk and Judge Dredd. Be warned, gentle reader, this man has three projects in the works, looming like great smelly cowflops on the pastures of next summer.