Let’s be honest, when we all heard a Street Fighter movie was being made back in the 90′s, gamers everywhere, myself included, rejoiced at the thought of Ryu and Ken shooting fireballs from their hands. Or even M. Bison dishing out some psycho power. Instead, we got the Muscles from Brussels as the American Guile, a short Sagat played by an actor known for his Native American roots, a not-so-pretty Vega and Damian Chapa as Ken Masters?!
The horrible dialogue and terrible fight sequences didn’t help the poor casting choice as it set the tone for future game-to-film flops. You would think director Andrzej Bartkowiak at least saw the first film and did everything in his power to do the opposite. That’s exactly what he did. What did we get? An even worse Street Fighter. While the first film relied heavily on cramming in as much SF characters as possible, Bartkowiak took the discreet route by having only six characters in his film: Chun Li (Kristin Kreuk), M. Bison (Neil McDonaugh), Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan), Charlie Nash (Chris Klein), Vega (Taboo of Black Eye Peas) and Gen (Robin Shou).
Where the first film failed in character development due to the high number of SF characters, so did Bartkowiak’s six with the exception of it’s title character Chun Li. Vega gets the worst of it as he’s only onscreen for a total of ten minutes!