Street Fighter (The Van Damme Movie, Unfortunately)

Street Fighter (1994)

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Stephen E. de Souza

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Byron Mann, Damian Capa

From: Universal

I watched this on Wednesday night, and I am just now posting this here. I haven't watched anything since, but I'll get back to the swing of things tonight. Anyhow, I saw this bad movie before, and thought it was bad. Well, it's still bad.

This is a movie that I've seen before and always thought was pretty bad; in the past few years I've heard several people on a messageboard praise it and they wanted me to see it again. Well, the El Rey Network showed it late last night so that's what I did.

I had to be honest to those people on that messageboard: I thought the movie still sucked.

Admittedly I never played any of the Street Fighter game on any of its console versions and rather played the arcade version of Street Fighter II (or rather, several of the many versions of SF II that Capcom released) a few times in my life. I don't have a deep love for the series, in other words. I am just rating this on whether it's a coherent, entertaining, or just plain good movie, and it's none of those thing. It's incoherent, confused, and it's not good overall. This is despite a gleefully over the top performance from Raul Julia as M. Bison; legend has it he only took the role for a paycheck as he was in poor health and wanted to help his family after he was gone. While I feel bad for bashing a movie when a lead actor did such a thing, my bashing of this has nothing to do with him or his performance, which was right for such goofball entertainment.

Polygon is a site I rarely look at and there are many reasons for that; them producing bad and whiny content is a big reason right there. Yet, in 2014 they wrote this great article where all the production problems were explained; even if the people interviewed aren't always clear or accurate with all of the facts, it explains how:

* Filming in Bangkok did not go smoothly at all... although at least they enjoyed partaking in the massage parlors

* Capcom had too much influence on production and demanded all those characters from the game, which was a big problem.

* Director Stephen E. de Souza was a talented and proven screenwriter, but a newbie as a director, and that caused problems.

* Several members of the crew experienced major ailments, including a heart attack and a car crash.

* Jean-Claude Van Damme was in the midst of a bad drug problem, and had an affair w/ co-star Kylie Minogue to boot.

* There was not even one Hadouken.

* The MPAA reared its ugly head again.

The movie ended up making money worldwide; that said, I still think it's bad... although I understand Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is even worse. I do not fault the cast who was in this; it was just a troubled production where too many bad things happened and the script wasn't solid when filming began, resulting in this mess where a character is basically turned into The Incredible Hulk.