Spoilers ahead.
I watched Street Fighter earlier this week (Wednesday, Oct 28), again at Grand Sunshine Cinema in Ikebukuro. In IMAX.
I walked away from the film disappointed, which is a very good thing, because now I get to figure out WHY I wasn’t happy with it.
The film begins with some back story: Ryu is listening to music. Ken smashes his cassette player into pieces. Okay, character traits have been established easily. Great job. This is a recurring thing in the film — Sakurai does a really great job of introducing characters. Every single character is portrayed in a way that makes them more interesting, distinct, and likeable than in the video games — even the villains.
Whether the actors playing those characters are good or not, I’m not quite sure. Some of them were great (eg: Dhalsim, Ryu, Cammy, Zangief, Blanka, Chun-Li, Vega, and to a lesser extent, Ken). Some were absolutely horrible casting choices (Bison, the main villain, is a caricature).
I could write a whole essay on how much I disliked Bison, but let’s just say that I simply couldn’t recognize him as Bison.
That being said, this article is about notes on writing, not casting, so let’s continue.
The core engine of the film — the big unresolved questions which make you as an audience member want to sit through to the end, seems to be this:
- Ryu has gone missing, where is he and what is he doing?
- Bison wants to steal Ryu’s Hado power, will he succeed? What will he do with it?
- Ryu was taken over by his “dark side”, will that happen again? Will Ken be able to protect Ryu?
These are all great, but very soon, the plot turns into spaghetti.
The mystery of “where is Ryu” is hyped up and then abruptly resolved, popping like a balloon.
Chun-Li asks Ken where Ryu is, and he says he doesn’t know, because he’s missing for many years. In the VERY NEXT SCENE, not only do we find out where Ryu is, but Chun-Li magically appears in front of him, saying that he wasn’t very hard to find, and proceeds to invite him to a tournament.
The second engine, “will Bison succeed in capturing Ryu?” also gets popped and discarded easily: Bison simply abducts Ryu after a bar fight (!) and can do whatever he wants, but then postpones extracting it. Apparently, he needed a totally different kind of machine from the one that was shown initially.
Eventually, Ryu escapes, after giving away only a small chunk of power. Later when we see BOTH him and Akuma release their full power in the climax. Bison leaves Ryu behind, captures Akuma, and goes off. He hasn’t extracted Akuma’s powers, apparently, even after the post-credits scene.
Only the THIRD engine (the question of Ryu’s dark side, and the rift between him and Ken) is carried all the way to the climax. One could argue that this is the heart of the film.
But EVEN THIS ONE isn’t used properly, because there is an obvious plot hole.
Ryu has been living with guilt (he secretly sabotaged Ken’s progress as a martial artist out of jealousy). Ryu gets multiple opportunities to talk to Ken about this and confess his feelings (and more or less conclude the movie before the half way point), but the plot prevents him from doing so because… Ken is angry and doesn’t want to listen.
It would be understandable if Ryu had been the one avoiding talking to Ken, and revealed this bomb in the end — but the film effectively throws Ken’s personality under the bus to elevate Ryu as someone who has already come to terms with himself and wants to do the right thing, before the film even begins.
Ken, who is initially setup as “the guy entrusted to protect Ryu from himself” is instead the guy who Ryu spends much of the film trying to protect.
So the obvious conclusion has to wait, and the story has to meander a bit more. Okay, I can handle it. At least we have a tournament to look forward to — maybe something interesting will happen in the final fight.
But NO! Most of the tournament fights aren’t even shown.
AND there is yet another parallel story that not only does nothing to move the film forward, it actively distracts from it: Chun-Li’s covert mission to infiltrate Bison’s inner circle and kill or arrest him.
Apparently she needs Ken’s help to do this (??), but Ken is a lost drunk, so his friends Guile and Dhalsim come in as catalysts to help him rediscover himself. (The fight between him and Dhalsim is good, but exactly how Ken rediscovers himself during the fight is still a mystery to me: he simply somehow starts striking harder and more precisely while Dhalsim talks to him.)
Deep sigh. The whole tournament was first revealed to be a ruse by Bison to draw out Ryu, but he’s able to capture him at a bar fight before the tournament even begins, so the tournament is now simply a plot vehicle for Dhalsim to be Ken’s executive coach.
Now look — there is no harm in having multiple storylines in a film, as long as they are going in the same direction and converge at some point, or even if the connection is fleeting and incidental.
Inglourious Basterds, Pulp Fiction, and even Babel (2006) come to mind as respective examples of EXCELLENT, unforgettable films in this category.
The film had potential. The initial premise and setup were great, the visual language and execution was great, and most action scenes were fun. And that is what makes me the most disappointed.
