Street Fighter

Street Fighter

Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Kylie Minogue

Directed by Steven de Souza

It's common for a big-name actor to have at least one film in their resume that they're not proud of - George Clooney in "Batman & Robin," Halle Berry in "Catwoman," Sandra Bullock in "All About Steve" - but at least they get a chance to redeem themselves with better films.  Some actors, unfortunately, never get that chance - either they're run out of Hollywood altogether, or more tragic they pass away.  Hollywood icon Orson Welles is easily best known for his groundbreaking work in the cinematic classic "Citizen Kane," but one of his final films before his passing was voicing the menacing planet-eating monster Unicron in "The Transformers Movie," a role that he himself said afterward he was embarrassed about.  Another big-name actor was Raul Julia, best known for his role in "The Addams Family" as well as his fantastic work in films like "Kiss of the Spider Woman."  For him, his final film was "Street Fighter," and while it'll easily go down as one of the worst video game movies ever, the lone bright light of the film was his committed performance.

In the Southeast Asian nation of Shadaloo, the evil warlord M. Bison (Raul Julia) has taken several relief workers hostage, threatening to kill them of he doesn't receive twenty billion dollars.  Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) rises up against Bison and brings his team together to take him down, with the aid of his assistant Cammy (Kylie Minogue), but he's not the only one with an agenda.

Con men Ken (Damian Chapa) and Ryu (Byron Mann) are also in Thailand attempting to swindle arms dealer Sagat (Wes Studi), who's also working with Bison, and the two friends find themselves recruited by Guile for an undercover mission.  Reporter Chun-Li (Ming-Na Wen) is also there reporting on the incident, but secretly wishes for vengeance against Bison for what he did to her family years earlier, and together they attempt to stop Bison from murdering hundreds of innocent people.

Video game movies have a very tumultuous history, as it seems it's almost impossible to successfully transfer the concepts of a video game to a live-action film, and "Street Fighter" often sits at the top of the throne of terrible video game films, and rightfully so.  The dialogue is atrocious (especially Guile's "rousing" speech to his troops, which will easily go down as the worst inspirational speech of anyone in any film ever).  The action sequences are extremely laughable, coming off as a cheap made-for-television event rather than a supposed big-budget spectacle.  The story is lacking any creativity and the characters have little to no development except for the fact that we remember them from the iconic "Street Fighter II" game, but also many have little to do with their video-game counterparts.  Even from a "it's so bad it's good" standpoint, "Street Fighter" doesn't hold up - it's just too boring to be entertaining for the most part.

Yet the most intriguing story about the film is the total role reversal of characters to actors that happened behind the scenes.  In the film, Jean-Claude Van Damme is the hero, who sets out to take down the evil, tyrannical Bison, played by Raul Julia.  In real life, Julia was more a hero than Van Damme, due to their personal struggles.  During filming, Van Damme was dealing with a cocaine habit that often made him late on set or not show up at all, and was disastrously hard to work with.  On the flip side, Julia was dealing with stomach cancer that would ultimately end his life shortly after filming, but he remained professional and dedicated to the project, taking the role because his children were fans of the video game, and he wanted to participate in a film that he thought they would enjoy with him.  The cast and crew hailed him as a man of honor and integrity, an actor who deeply researched his character and whose performance was hailed as the best thing in the film - and rightfully so.

In the pantheon of terrible video game films, "Street Fighter" achieves the upper echelon time and again, and will easily go down as one of the worst due to having hardly any redeeming qualities to it - and most importantly it's not even good enough to enjoy on a satirical level.

The Score: D-