Spoilers ahead. You've been warned.
I was quite disappointed by this film, after enjoying the original animated feature so much.
There's so much in the film that's unexplored. Akuma is the focus of much of the promo material and the blurb on the back of the video/DVD packaging... and yet his appearance in the film it little more than a sixty-second cameo. IS Shun Ryu's brother or not? It's apparently implied that he isn't by his dying words, but if he's not - what IS he? Maybe the Japanese language version had it better, but it's very confusing and scrambled. The inclusion of the character of Sakura is utterly needless and adds nothing to the flim - perhaps if she had just been in a short cameo like some of the other game characters, and you could just point at the screen and go "hey, there's Sakura," and that was all, it would work better, but as it stands, she serves no purpose being the film at all.
My main problem with it is the general *pointlessness* of it all. By the end of the film, we're right back exactly where we started, and nothing's changed, except Ryu's a little better off.
Deeply, DEEPLY annoying is the animation team's apparently fascination with Chun-Li's butt, crotch and chest. Almost every shot of her opens up on one of these body parts, and when the camera's on other characters, one of these three parts is always poking into the screen from the side. It's very irritating.
I'm not even sure if this is supposed to be in the same continuity as the first SF movie, because there's a lot of things that don't match up, even if it's supposed to be acting as a prologue.
Basically, this film is trying to be something it shouldn't. Street Fighter shouldn't be about a deep, meaningful storyline - it should be about people beating the snot out of each other, which is what the first film was, and it was all the better for it.
I was quite disappointed by this film, after enjoying the original animated feature so much.
There's so much in the film that's unexplored. Akuma is the focus of much of the promo material and the blurb on the back of the video/DVD packaging... and yet his appearance in the film it little more than a sixty-second cameo. IS Shun Ryu's brother or not? It's apparently implied that he isn't by his dying words, but if he's not - what IS he? Maybe the Japanese language version had it better, but it's very confusing and scrambled. The inclusion of the character of Sakura is utterly needless and adds nothing to the flim - perhaps if she had just been in a short cameo like some of the other game characters, and you could just point at the screen and go "hey, there's Sakura," and that was all, it would work better, but as it stands, she serves no purpose being the film at all.
My main problem with it is the general *pointlessness* of it all. By the end of the film, we're right back exactly where we started, and nothing's changed, except Ryu's a little better off.
Deeply, DEEPLY annoying is the animation team's apparently fascination with Chun-Li's butt, crotch and chest. Almost every shot of her opens up on one of these body parts, and when the camera's on other characters, one of these three parts is always poking into the screen from the side. It's very irritating.
I'm not even sure if this is supposed to be in the same continuity as the first SF movie, because there's a lot of things that don't match up, even if it's supposed to be acting as a prologue.
Basically, this film is trying to be something it shouldn't. Street Fighter shouldn't be about a deep, meaningful storyline - it should be about people beating the snot out of each other, which is what the first film was, and it was all the better for it.