Greetings, and welcome to the first (and possibly last) edition of RGT at the Movies! Brought to you by Strategist and ATenderLad. This review came about after having a discussion about terrible video game movies in the comments of the movie article. That late night shit-talk was the genesis of this incredible joint effort. RGT members get two reviews for the price of one! For the cheap price of 100 M.Bison dollars, you can acquire this high quality review written by RGT’s best video game film critics of the highest caliber. ATenderLad brings vast knowledge of films to the table while I bring my obsessive knowledge of Street Fighter lore. Let’s begin.
Strategist’s Prologue
Commenting on anything Street Fighter related might seem odd coming from me, considering I don’t particularly enjoy fighting games. My memories of Street Fighter 2 are mostly traumatic. They are limited to getting my ass kicked at the arcades by the ringers and my friends kicking my ass even harder at home on the SNES. But I have a unique perspective to share specifically related to "Street Fighter: The Movie". The Street Fighter movie was actually somewhat of a phenomenon in the island of Puerto Rico. This film was to be the final movie of one of the most beloved actors from our island, Raul Julia. When I say he’s beloved, I’m not exaggerating. Raul Julia is a national hero, and there are theaters and streets named after him over here. I don’t remember all of the details, since I was a child at the time, but it was all over the news that he was suffering from a serious bout with cancer. His decision to participate in this movie was related to this unfortunate circumstance. He was usually more of a dramatic actor, participating in prestige movies but he wanted to work on a film that his kids could appreciate before he passed. That lead to him accepting the role of M. Bison in the Street Fighter movie. When he finally passed away, it was all over the news. There was a public mourning period and a public procession with thousands of mourners covered by the news. Those events boosted the profile of the movie over here to the point that my dad wanted to watch it with me. I warned him that the movie might be a stinker. Still, it was the final movie of a national hero so we all went to pay our respects. I barely remember anything about the movie except Raul Julia trying to make the best of it and hamming it up all the way to 11, and Jean Claude Van Damme was kind of fun at that time, I didn’t hate him as Guile. But that’s basically all I remember other than the general feeling of thinking it sucked. I was curious to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
Here’s a picture of Julia and Meryl Streep in a theater production of Shakespeare's “Taming of the Shrew”. Julia was an experienced theatrical actor and that influence is clearly reflected in his portrayal of M.Bison.
Movie Summary
The movie starts out with a news report of the geopolitical situation of Street Fighter. And right from the beginning the lore fuck ups are extremely noticeable, if you are at all familiar with the Street Fighter series. The movie is set in the fictional Shadaloo city, in Thailand where Chun Li Zang, the intrepid reporter (she’s supposed to be an Interpol agent) is investigating the criminal organization headed by aspiring dictator M. Bison. Guile, played by Jean Claude Van Damme, is the military commander of the Allied Nation forces. Guile hacks into Bison’s computer systems and cuts a cringe wrestling style promo on him. Dee Jay, who is apparently Bison’s tech support instead of a happy go lucky, maraca playing kickboxer, warns Bison about the hack and shuts them down. Bison has captured Guile’s best bud, Carlos Blanka AKA Charlie, and is planning to do genetic experiments on him. He captured a bunch of civilian hostages too, including a doctor to perform the experiments. The doctor is also Dhalsim for some reason. Oh by the way, Kylie Minogue (remember her, the pop-star who topped the UK charts in the 90’s?) plays Cammy and she is Guile’s second in command instead of Bison’s genetic experiment.
Ming-Na Wen, the actress who plays Chun-Li, is giving it the good ol' college try, but she is a bit lacking in the charisma department.
Meanwhile, JCVD is the least convincing actor to play an American since Tommy Wiseau in "The Room".
Yes, these two jamokes are supposed to be Ryu and Ken. I am as disappointed as you are.
A street fight, in a Street Fighter movie? They can’t possibly fuck this up, right?
Oh, yes. Yes, they can absolutely fuck it up.
American on American crime. You hate to see it.
With pickup lines like those, I'm surprised she wasn't tearing her clothes off.
Bison knows the finer points of building a criminal empire.
Lightning Kick, this is not.
Nice try, movie. Too little, too late.
From here on a bunch of filler bullshit happens. Guile takes a quaint boat trip down a river in Thailand, the AN army invades Bison’s base, a lot of shooting and explosions. Very few martial arts fights for a Street Fighter movie, though. Oh and I forgot to mention, Dhalsim finishes his experiments on Charlie and he becomes Blanka. A security guard beats the shit out of Dhalsim for not training Blanka properly and he takes a bath in mutagens and chemicals. That's probably an attempt at a Dhalsim origin story.
I’ve seen better monster makeup in an Ed Wood movie.
I could keep dunking on the movie, but ATenderLad wanted me to include this painting. It's one of the few clever references in the movie.
The only time the movie comes close to resembling the video game, unfortunately.
Its always funny when a bad movie is so painfully unaware of its badness to try and tease a sequel.
Strategist’s Review
Well, it turns out Street Fighter: The Movie is as bad as I remembered. If I were to distill the fundamental problem with the Street Fighter movie into one sentence, it would be this: It is more interested in trying to explain all the crazy shit in the Street Fighter universe instead of entertaining the audience. There’s more to it of course, like the bad acting, cliched script, cheesy martial arts, amateur makeup and cheap special effects. But many movies with those issues have managed to be entertaining and this one just doesn’t care to try outside of a couple of scenes. It was a pure cash grab, with little attention paid to the details of the universe. I’m not the biggest Street Fighter lore expert, but even I wrote 2 pages of notes of things the movie got wrong. In the end, there’s very little I can recommend from this movie in good faith, aside from Raul Julia’s occasional over the top performance and JCVD’s kicks.
If you want to watch a film adaptation of the Street Fighter franchise, I recommend you check out Street Fighter: The Animated Movie over this mess. That movie covers the same basic plot points, but has excellent animation, great action scenes and is filled with fan service. It gets what a movie about Street Fighter should be more than this one AND cares enough to get the lore right. If you are looking for a JCVD fix, watch Kickboxer or Bloodsport. Those movies do the underground fighting tournament trope better than this one.
ATenderLad’s Review
Street Fighter (1994) is like watching most of you have sex; easy to laugh at, but difficult to watch. In both situations, you have to wonder if inviting Jean Claude Van Damme was a good idea.
He barely says "Hi" before he starts setting up the poles.
Writer Stephen E. de Souza came to Street Fighter with enthusiasm and momentum, having turned out the scripts for movies like Commando (1985) and the original Die Hard (1988). Trouble was, he was also the director! I won’t say the guy doesn’t know action movies – he could turn out a short story on a cocktail napkin that’s better than anything I could dream up – but for a movie about eccentric martial artists assaulting a warlord with a private army, things rarely get more exciting than an afternoon nap.
The fights are brief, and few punches land without a camera edit intervening. So much of the fisticuffs happen in closeups, with the actors’ full bodies rarely visible. (It’s true in action, and it’s true in musicals; we should see the actors’ footwork). The camera often cuts before a strike lands, usually to a new angle behind the person being hit and recoiling from the blow. It’s kind of understandable though, most of the cast had little experience “selling” action. Most of the blows we do see clearly look awkward, with JCVD being the only real exception.
In fairness to the cast, production troubles meant they were often unprepared for a new stunt or piece of fight choreography. Shooting on-location in Thailand, for example, meant extreme heat and restrictions from the local government that set the movie back frequently; juggling that along with accommodating Raul Julia *literally* dying of cancer meant the original schedule went up in smoke. Other issues like an extremely difficult star – I’ll get to JCVD shortly – and a severe falling out between the director and the stunt coordinator made this a miserable job for most everyone involved. (Kylie Minogue was reportedly a joy to work with though, that’s nice).
Sometimes I see a picture and think "Could *I* look that cool with a light anti-tank weapon?"
If anyone’s doing a great job, it’s the villains. Everyone knows about Raul Julia in this movie, so I won’t talk about him too much. Suffice to say, he’s asked to ham it up and chew the scenery, and Julia didn’t leave a crumb behind. RIP, you beautiful king. All of the movie’s best comedy really went to him and his minions, Deejay and Zangief. (Miguel A. Núñez Jr. and Andrew Bryniarski, respectively). Núñez is basically mugging for the camera at every batshit insane thing that happens around him, he treats being the right hand of a nefarious dictator like a day shift at Office Depot. Meanwhile, Bryniarski’s Zangief is a lovable idiot who can’t tell he’s working for the bad guys. (He gets the best line in the movie, shouting “Quick, change the channel!” at a *live* camera feed of an explosive truck heading right for him).
If anyone’s doing a terrible job, it’s JCVD. Our star actor was a prima donna on set – when he bothered to even leave the presidential suite the studio had to secure for him – and his drug habit at the time was making Sylvester Stallone in the 80’s look like Sylvester Stallone in the 90’s. They even hired a handler of sorts to keep him in line, but the guy apparently lasted all of “You like to party?” before joining in, the pair of them enabling each other to new heights.
Pictured above: Jean Claude and his life coach.
Consequently, in a long career of furious roundhouses and morose acting, Street Fighter is probably the worst performance Van Damme ever gave. He’s barely trying, and the lack of chemistry with basically everyone really shows. The best compliment I can give is that he can actually do the shit the movie was supposedly made for, and if the choreography were worth a damn, that would have been enough.
(Actually, this is a nitpick but it’s always bugged me. Guile does a Flash Kick-adjacent flip kick during the fight with Bison, but it’s at a random moment while he’s up against a wall. The big climax of the fight – with Raul Julia flying at him like Superman – sees JCVD countering with a flying roundhouse like his last fight in Bloodsport (1988), lovingly depicted multiple times from different camera angles. Why wasn’t *that* the moment to do the Flash Kick? It just seems obvious! Supposedly, the stunt coordinator picked a fight with the director over not including the moves from the games, which the director said looked too fake for live-action. I mostly agree, but a Flash Kick would be an awesome exception).
On a positive note, the set designers has a blast with Bison’s lair. It screams Bond villain, and there’s a repeated visual motif of screens to evoke the arcade cabinets. Seriously, there are screens of all kinds *everywhere* in this movie, and the opening scene actually changes aspect ratio to something resembling 4:3 for a moment. (Bison’s silly murder console also uses the arcade controls, but that’s pretty on the nose…) There’s also an extended sequence involving a fancy stealth attack that needs a bit of explanation.
So, Guile is in the Air Force, and the third act would have featured him leading an aerial assault as a pilot. Apparently the government in Thailand rejected their airspace being used that way, so they pivoted to a high-tech superboat in the vein of shows like Thunder in Paradise (1993) or Knight Rider (1982)...the latter of which Stephen E. de Sousa actually wrote for, funny enough. They even put a VHS player in the boat so Guile could take a moment to remind us he’s missing his buddy Carlos Blanka, but an actual VHS tape wouldn’t have fit neatly in his pocket; he pulls what’s *clearly* an audio cassette from his uniform instead and still gets a picture out of it. (Is this too old a reference now? Someone kill me, before time does its grisly work).
It still needs to *feel* like a fighter jet, so there’s his name on it. It’s a real missed opportunity for a callsign, though. Col. William “Bloodsport Is Now Available On Home Video” Guile!
There’s just a few other things that jumped out at me on rewatch. The introductory shot is a grandiose picture of the Earth, but if audiences didn’t know the full title of Street Fighter II was “World Warrior” it makes no sense? Also, the villains being based in southeast Asia meant that the writer drew on his only real experience with that part of the world: the Vietnam War, oddly enough! There’s a local radio DJ occasionally heard in Shadowloo City, and he’s played by Adrian Cronauer, the real-life inspiration for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). He’s basically doing a Street Fighter-branded version of the shtick he did back in the military, it’s kinda bizarre! (He also drops a few jokes over the credits). There’s also a curious scene later, where the governments of the world decide to pay off Bison and cease hostilities, and Guile gives a (very boring) speech about “staying put and finishing the job”, then taking off to lead the attack. Basic action movie scene, but the verbiage is pretty familiar. I don’t actually think de Souza was “saying* anything here, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
My overall opinion is that they got a guy who delivered multiple great 80’s action movies to make another 80’s action movie. Trouble is, this property is based on martial arts films, and the rules tend to be pretty different. Even if everything had gone to plan and the production went off without a hitch, the lack of compelling fight scenes would make this hard to love. It’s an occasionally funny comedy, but it’s also so wacky that the attempts at drama never add up. It’s like penny poker; the stakes are always low.
Epilogue
Much to my surprise, Street Fighter the Movie was a huge box office success. The movie earned 10 million on its opening weekend and proceeded to earn 99 million worldwide out of a 35 million dollar budget. Capcom claims it still earns their company tens of millions of yen every year to this day. That just goes to show the lasting appeal of the Street Fighter IP, even in bastardized form.
As if it wasn't enough for the movie to be a giant stinkfest, it brought its special brand of awful to the video game realm. The video game adaptations of the movie released in the arcades first and were ported to the Saturn and PS1. The game used rotoscoped captures of the actors of the movie for the animations but way shittier than the level of quality established by the Mortal Kombat franchise. I can’t recall ever playing it but just from looking at it from afar in the arcades I knew it was crap. The console ports were even worse as they were not accurate arcade ports and were noted as buggy and suffering from slowdown.
The Street Fighter movies continued after this pile of dung. They decided to bring back Street Fighter to the movie theaters in 2009 with “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li”. I know next to nothing about the movie, other than it exists, and I don’t want to know anything about it. I can’t comment about it in good faith but I’m sure everyone tried their best.
And that is all, folks! Feel free to sound off in the comments if you enjoyed or hated “Street Fighter: The Movie”. Thanks for reading.
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