The Videogame Cinema Project:
Street Fighter
Written by Matt
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        One look at the credits for Street Fighter (1994) tells you that this film has a major ace up its sleeve: writer / director Steven E. De Souza. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a classic action flick with which De Souza had a hand in the writing. He’s credited on the seminal buddy-cop caper 48 Hrs., the criminally underrated Denzel Washington thriller Ricochet, the hilarious Schwarzenegger campfest Commando…oh, and a little film called Die Hard, which, well, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this right now and go watch Die Hard. Seriously. You’re not allowed to read my reviews if you haven’t seen Die Hard.

        In short, De Souza is a master action storyteller, and it helps to bring in a ringer if you’re going to turn a videogame series with no story into a film. Street Fighter is actually credited as an adaptation of the mega-popular Street Fighter II series of games, which pit a gang of super-powered warriors, each with their own devastating magical moves, against each other in mano-a-mano tournament-style fighting. In the world of the game, these fighters have been gathered in the mystical kingdom of Shadaloo by M. Bison, a psychotic warlord who is the final computer-controlled boss in the original Street Fighter II game (in later editions, he became a playable character). Some of the game’s other characters, such as hard-hitting military man Guile and undercover Interpol agent Chun-Li, are given Bison-hating backstories to explain their motivations for entering the dictator’s tournament. For the most part, though, this narrative is a mere skeleton undergirding the game’s real raison d’être: ass-kicking, and lots of it.

        The bare-bones nature of Street Fighter II’s plot gives De Souza a lot of latitude to craft his own story, and he chucks the tournament concept in favor of the sort of paramilitary action bash the pre-Clinton-era studios turned out by the bushelful. The film is indeed set in Shadaloo, which we learn in an opening news-broadcast montage has just been forcibly overtaken by the mad M. Bison (Raul Julia, in his final film performance). His lunatic army has captured a band of relief workers and their military escorts, and the general has given the “Allied Nations” (the film’s fantasy version of the UN) three days to pay him a $20 billion ransom, or the hostages die. Little does Bison know that his insane quest for power has resulted in some formidable enemies. There’s the high-kicking Chun-Li (Ming-Na Wen), whose father died at Bison’s hands and who has posed as a reporter to get into Shadaloo. There’s former sumo wrestling champion E. Honda (Peter Tuiasosopo) and boxing great Balrog (Grand L. Bush), whose careers were ruined by Bison for unexplained reasons and who have joined Chun-Li in her quest for revenge. And, of course, there’s the Allied Nations military, led by Col. William Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who’s got his own reasons for targeting the warlord: his good friend and fellow soldier Carlos Blanka (Robert Mammone) has been captured by Bison and is being subjected to hideous experiments to transform him into…well, if you know Street Fighter, look at the character’s last name again. You know what he’s becoming.

        As you have no doubt gathered, De Souza works overtime to shoehorn as many Street Fighter characters into the mix as possible. Ryu (Byron Mann) and Ken (Damian Chapa) are re-cast as small-time hustlers who run afoul of Bison when their deal to sell arms to Shadaloo’s major crime lord, the one-eyed former cage fighter Sagat (Wes Studi), goes sour. Sagat’s right-hand-man? Why, it’s masked, claw-gloved ninja Vega (Jay Tavare). Guile’s top AN lieutenants? None other than thrust-kicking Cammy (Kylie Minogue) and Native American warrior T. Hawk (Gregg Rainwater). Among Bison’s henchmen are mohawked muscleman Zangief (Andrew Bryniarski), musical fighter Dee Jay (Miguel A. Nunez), and Indian mystic Dhalsim (Roshan Seth), who here is a non-loinclothed scientist forced against his will to transform Blanka into a monster.

        Sheesh. That’s a LOT of characters, and that’s one of the major hazards of making a game series like Street Fighter into a film. The temptation is to include as many of the games’ characters as you can, but it’s almost impossible to give them all something to do, so you run the constant risk of pissing off the fanboys by short-shrifting their favorite fighter (something I’ll be talking about in greater detail in the next review in this series). To be fair, De Souza’s script balances this unwieldy cast about as well as can be expected, but inevitably, a number of characters get the short end of the narrative stick. Some of them, such as Balrog and T. Hawk, get a pitifully small amount of onscreen fighting time, while others, like Dee Jay and Dhalsim, don’t even get to throw a punch. Cammy is stuck playing second fiddle to Guile, and Vega, my favorite character from the Street Fighter series, gets a paltry three lines of dialogue. (Side note: You know who was briefly considered for the role of Vega? Fabio. No kidding.) Really, this is Guile, Chun-Li and Bison’s show, so if you like these three characters, you’ll probably have a better time with this film than most other fans of the series. I must say that considering Van Damme’s presence here, it’s to De Souza’s credit that he didn’t just turn Street Fighter into Guile: The Movie. Van Damme fans will be surprised by the comparatively small amount of screen time the actor has. This really is an ensemble film, and though Van Damme gets top billing and the final showdown with the main heavy, each character has their moment in the spotlight, however brief it might be.

        In a cast of this size, it’s really up to the actors to make their characters stand out, and some are admittedly more successful than others. Bush and Tuiasosopo have some amusing interplay together, and Bryniarski (later to achieve notoriety as Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes) is genuinely funny as the clueless Zangief. Ming-Na is suitably intense as Chun-Li, and Studi melts the screen with his molten stare. Sadly, Mann and Chapa are two kinds of vanilla in their roles, and their prominent place in the narrative as double agents working secretly for Guile slows down that part of the story. Minogue and Rainwater really aren’t given enough to do to make an impression, and Tavare is so striking a visual presence with his steel mask and fierce gaze that you just wish De Souza would have given him more to do as well. Van Damme is ostensibly the hero here, but his performance is flatter than usual for him. He can be capable of stoic hard-boiled acting that is up there with the best of them (John Woo’s Hard Target is, for my money, a minor classic of the action genre), but here he just seems to be getting the lines out without any real passion or energy. Really, this is Raul Julia’s show. The actor was battling stomach cancer at the time the film was made (he died in October of 1994, two months before Street Fighter’s release), and he looks dismayingly gaunt onscreen, but he tears into his maniacal role like a man who knows his days are numbered. He’s got a few magnificent speeches that he socks home like they’re Shakespeare, and in his final battle with Guile, he practically howls at the moon as he glories in the lightning-and-flying power granted to him by his special military uniform. “What’s the matter?” he barks at Guile. “You came to fight a madman, and instead find a god?...For I beheld Satan as he came down from heaven!” This is great crazy bad guy stuff, and it’s the first line in one of these movies that I felt like quoting because I actually liked it. After the disappointment of Robert Patrick’s chief baddie in Double Dragon, it’s a pleasure to find a videogame movie villain who actually works.

        This is of course not the only way in which Street Fighter has it all over Double Dragon as a movie. This international production, shot partially on location in Bangkok, looks fantastic, with eye-catching sets by William Creber and colorful costumes by Deborah La Gorce Kramer (Bison’s red leather Nazi-type getup was specially designed by Marilyn Vance). More importantly, De Souza made sure to fill his cast with actors who actually look like they can fight. There are no actual tournament-style fights in this film (Ryu and Vega get within an inch of going at it before their underground fight is broken up by Guile’s AN forces), but the martial arts battles, when they do come, are swift and impressive-looking, if PG-13 bloodless. Van Damme is his usually hard-hitting self, and with the aid of wires, he even gets to hit Bison with a couple of flash kicks, easily the film’s highlight. Several of the characters get to perform their signature moves, though most, like Ryu’s hadoken (arguably the most famous special fighting move in video games), are deployed in blink-and-you-miss-it fashion. Unlike in Double Dragon, there is no magic deployed here. Bison’s levitation and lighting blasts are the closest we come to fantastical powers, and even those are clearly granted to him by his specially designed uniform. Still, the action scenes are not as spectacular as they could have been, mainly due to De Souza’s staging. He tends to shoot in middle close-ups, so we don’t get to see the whole actors’ bodies in motion during their combat, and the cutting is so fast and sometimes choppy that it’s hard for the eye to track what’s happening (not surprising, since there are five editors listed in the credits for this film). Street Fighter was De Souza’s first, and ultimately only, feature directing credit, and while he is an undisputed wizard of action writing, his directing of it still could use some work.

        That notwithstanding, as an action spectacle, Street Fighter wipes the floor with the broom-headed Double Dragon. Also, like Super Mario Bros., it plays fast and loose with some of the game’s original mythology, but unlike Mario, it doesn’t twist it so drastically that the result barely resembles its source material. While Street Fighter, like its two predecessors, was blasted by the critics, it was the first videogame film adaptation that was a commercial success; its worldwide grosses tripled the film’s budget, which must have been a relief to De Souza, who deferred his salary to pay for his large cast. It looked like Hollywood was inching their way toward making a genuinely good videogame movie. And what was next? Another fighting-game adaptation. Double Dragon was bad. Street Fighter was better. And what of Mortal Kombat? Tune in next time to find out.

        So, does “Street Fighter” suck? Surprisingly, not really. It’s hardly the masterpiece one would expect from De Souza’, but as a PG-13 action fantasy, it more or less works on its own terms.

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