The third in my series of video game film essays for 1up.com. I still remember watching this when I was little and feeling acute disappointment at what was on-screen, which was confusing because I mostly liked everything when little, but somehow I liked this piece of everything a little bit less.
While Double Dragon was the first video game adaptation to grace theaters in 1994, it wasn’t the one that people remembered. Not because it wasn’t a memorable experience—if anything, it was too memorable, just for all the wrong reasons—but because like the franchise it was adapted from, the Double Dragon film was in every way overshadowed by Street Fighter. Not only did Street Fighter stay in theaters for more than two weeks, it had a real studio backing the production, a recognizable star, and a trailer that didn’t look like it was for a Saturday morning children’s show. As a matter of fact, the best part of Street Fighter is the film’s trailers and publicity material. Until its release, Street Fighter looked ready to break the pattern of terrible game adaptations and offer something that would at least be a decent action movie. Oh, how naïve we were back then.
Street Fighter was big Hollywood’s first real foray into video game adaptations. Both of the previous adaptation swere certainly of professional quality, or at least they could be said to have been shot on professional level film stock, but they were made independently. There was some evidence that perhaps video games and movies don’t mix well, but it’s easy to see how, to big American studios, the first two pictures looked like the work of some incompetent outsider bunglers. They were experiments, and if there’s one thing that major studios don’t care for, it’s experiments (actually, aside from losing money, that’s the only thing Hollywood doesn’t like). Sure things are where the money’s at, and Street Fighter II’s arcade cabinet was the best-selling one since Pac-Man. So despite Super Mario Bros.’ infamous flop, Hollywood, in this case Universal and Columbia, were interested in trying their luck once again.
The first problem in Street Fighter’s creation occurred before the movie had even entered pre-production. Hollywood super producer Edward R. Pressman knew that the teens flooding arcades with their quarters would be just as keen on flooding theaters with their dollars, and another associate of his, Sasha Harari, had spoken with representatives from Capcom interested in possibly developing the film. The only problem was that he had no idea what these newfangled video games were, and was at a loss as to where to go from there. Harari knew one guy, though, with just enough peripheral contact with the video game industry to seem competent and slightly more experience with action films: enter Steven E. de Souza.
Watching Street Fighter, it’s easy to immediately come to the conclusion that an insane person must have written the entire movie the night before it was made. Structure, characterization, and above all dialogue are disasters almost straight through, as if the entire project were like a middle school paper written on the car ride before school. Sadly, it just so happens that this isn’t too far off from the way Street Fighter was actually written. Harari knew that de Souza had worked on the video game for his Cadillacs and Dinosaurs TV series (although what his duties as the game’s executive producer actually were is hard to say) and had written screenplays for 48 Hrs. and Die Hard, so he recommended him to Pressman. Pressman then asked de Souza to write an action-adventure movie based on the game by lunch the next day, and de Souza said ok, with the proviso that if they went with his idea he got to direct. De Souza pulled a fated all-nighter, and the next day his presentation to Capcom was a success, fast-tracking the movie to production despite the fact that his idea was absolutely terrible and he was in no way qualified to direct a blockbuster movie.
De Souza’s idea for the picture manages to bear some striking resemblance to the series of games it’s adapted from while still managing to be so off-target as to have forgotten what he was even aiming for. In it, M. Bison is a tyrannical dictator ruling Shadaloo, a South Asian country that looks strikingly like (but is legally distinct from) Thailand. The Allied Nations, a group—or league, if you will—of nations that looks strikingly like (but is legally distinct from) the United Nations with their U’s repainted into A’s, wants him out, except Bison has a set of what appear to be maybe 10-15 valuable hostages keeping them at bay. Later on in the picture these hostages are pretty much forgotten while the AN eradicates Bison’s forces without breaking a sweat, but for now Bison is demanding $20 billion for the hostages’ release, which even in 1994 was a large sum but not an unreasonably large one—it’s about the same as purchasing two aircraft carriers sans aircraft, or how much Blizzard earns from World of Warcraft every 3-4 months.
You might notice that while that plot setup has some pretty obvious shortcomings, its biggest problem is that it’s a movie about <em>Street Fighter</em> and not just a new action franchise. The actual story of the games is insanely convoluted too—perhaps even more so than the film, as can be seen by our own Jeremy Parish’s attempt to map out what’s actually happening in them—but one thing’s for certain: it’s first and foremost about street fighting in tournaments. While the movie briefly flirts with the concept of an underground fighting circuit, its actual focus on being a military thriller heavy on the slapstick is pretty far from the concept of the games. The movie also rejects the games’ protagonists Ryu and Ken in favor of ra ra American military man Guile, although at least they still kept Bison as the villain.
What seems to have been the most important part of the <em>Street Fighter</em> movie for de Souza was figuring out how to jam as many characters from the game into the film as possible. While Guile is the hero and Bison is the villain, with no one in between really doing anything of value, the ranks of every minor character are filled with roles too large to be considered cameos but too small to be considered relevant. Ken and Ryu are black-market weapons dealers who just happen to be experts in martial arts, Chun-Li is a reporter with a news crew comprised of E. Honda and Balrog (because de Souza seems to have gotten his black characters mixed up), Sagat is a drug lord working with Vega, Bison’s top henchmen are Dee Jay and Zangief, Dahlsim is a captive doctor creating Blanka, and Guile’s assistants are Cammy, T. Hawk, and uh… Captain Sawada, because they decided to switch out Fei Long at the last minute and couldn’t come up with anything better than the last name of the actor who plays him. That’s a ridiculously large cast and de Souza is no Robert Altman or P.T. Anderson, meaning that while all of these characters will get some screentime, as far as the story’s concerned other than Guile and Bison none of them actually accomplish anything. They’re there to pad the film length with irrelevant side stories and strange digressions, and towards this goal they succeed admirably.
Unfortunately, De Souza’s request to direct the film was granted, meaning that rather than working with a director who could salvage his material, he was writing for de Souza . Before Street Fighter, de Souza’s previous directing credits include Robot Monster: Special Edition, Arnold’s Wrecking Co., one episode of Tales from the Crypt, and… nothing else. But a $35 million picture (roughly equivalent to $52 million today) is an entirely different beast from a terrible straight-to-TV movie or a disappointing episode of a middling television show. He was in way over his head with the material, unable to keep a consistent tone for the film other than high camp, and was seemingly disinterested in performances. Other than Jean-Claude Van Damme actors were cast for their resemblance to characters rather than acting ability, and sets are visibly re-used again and again. The result of de Souza’s writing plus de Souza’s directing meant the picture is a big, sprawling movie framed by action sequences that require a fast-moving, streamlined format in order to function without an audience questioning them. As a result, neither the multi-character conceit nor the film’s ubiquitous yet consistently disappointing action sequences works as planned and the combination of the two drags Street Fighter into near-constant disappointment.
After an over-the-top title sequence with Columbia’s logo altered to match Bison’s, Street Fighter begins with video footage in what’s supposed to be an homage to video games because the term “video games” has the word “video” in it. This is an early signal about the level of sophistication the film is going for, and from here we get expository news footage about the world <Street Fighter takes place in. Like previous game adaptations, Street Fighter’s world is, at least in its fictionalized Shadaloo region, a dystopia, although this time it’s a somewhat realistic and somewhat racist portrait of what things could be like. We learn that Bison holds sway over the world with his vast array of weapons, which like Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s eventually turn out to be pretty much fictional. Bison himself is in fact watching these news reports from his secret base of evil operations, apparently to find out what he’s been up to lately, and leaves this on in the background for some good old fashioned hostage taunting.
While the film cross-cuts between the news report being shot and Bison’s lair, it’s immediately obvious which half ofStreet Fighter is more interesting. On one side we have idiotic military gobbledygook that would look clichéd in a 1940s war flick, and on the other half we have the pure camp spectacle that is Raúl Juliá’s performance. It’s impossible to address how gloriously hammy, how irrepressibly insatiable, how almost prancingly so-bad-he’s-good Juliá is in the movie. He and his base are from an entirely different world from everything else we see, filled with nonsensical stormtrooper jumpsuits and a platform that floats not for any tactical reason but because his character needs to literally flit about the screen. While the rest of the movie wavers between overly serious dramatization and ham-fisted comedy, Juliá vamps about in his character’s insanity without self-consciousness. He isn’t a menacing Bond villain, no, he’s above that, he’s jovially evil and insane. I would argue against every other characterization in the film, but there is no Bison that could be better than Juliá’s, who has a gleam of insanity from his first frame in the film until his last.
From the reports Bison watches we jump to Jean-Claude Van Damme, not at his Van Damme-iest—which is to say that for once he doesn’t do the splits and hit someone in the groin—but certainly without the acting panache to keep up his end of the picture. Van Damme’s Guile is exactly the Marine Corp.-esque stereotype he’s supposed to be, an inspiring military man who’s as stiff as a board and twice as two-dimensional. As usual for Van Damme he’s out to avenge a lost loved one, in this case his best friend Charlie, but Van Damme’s never as unconvincing as when he tries to give this throwaway plotline some pathos. While Bison’s motivation is insanity, evil, and an unexplored love for the color red, Guile’s is that he doesn’t like Bison because, you know, evil and stuff, and as an American he’s against that. It seems worth mentioning here that despite the film’s nominally multinational theme, many of its “foreign” actors are from the United States, while the character whose entire role seems to be running about shouting how great America is, i.e. Guile , is played by a Belgian.
After this first scene we jump to what some of the other cast members are up to, with Ryu and Ken watching the only thing that in any way approximates street fighting in the entire movie. We learn that they’re scoundrels with hearts of gold, but since Ryu is Japanese (with an inexplicably perfect American accent) his heart’s more gold than his opportunistic American counterpart, Ken. They scammed the drug lord Sagat and in punishment will have to fight his right hand man Vega, except Guile busts through the wall and as usual makes everything having to do with these four characters completely irrelevant. This is coupled with a similar sequence with Bison, where we meet Dr. Dahlsim doing experiments on Blanka for Bison in a plot that goes nowhere but does allow a few more of the game’s characters to say a couple lines. Street Fighter builds up Blanka as an unstoppable warrior-beast soldier for the rest of the movie, but this never pays off to anything and he seems largely forgotten in the film’s last 15 minutes.
Guile teams up, quite unnecessarily, with Ryu and Ken, and along the way gets himself quite fakely killed. This also comes to nothing, and at this point you may be sensing a pattern. Chun-Li and her gang try to blow up Bison and Sagat, but as usual for anyone in the film other than Guile they’re completely ineffectual. After this filler time is done, Guile decides to quit the army and steal untold millions of dollars of its equipment and personnel to attack Bison himself, which for some reason never has any repercussions whatsoever. He gives a histrionic motivational speech to his troops, all of whom desert the army to come along with him (presumably they’re later executed for treason), with Cammy swooning over his every word, setting into motion an attack on Bison that’s the only real event in the entire movie. Guile’s forces easily crush Bison’s, and from this moment onwards it’s only a matter of how long this will take.
Meanwhile, in Bison’s highly pregnable fortress, E. Honda and Balrog are being tortured while Chun-Li is taken to Bison’s special rape chambers. Being the classy tyrant and rapist that he is, Bison has outfitted Chun-Li in a red costume to go with his fortress’s color scheme and we watch him turn on mood lighting. But before a real fight can take place, they’re interrupted by the rest of the do-gooders while Bison gets away, so as not to violate the rule that no one other than Guile can do anything that actually matters.
We’re halfway done with the movie here, but luckily the plot’s pretty much all done. At this point de Souza has a few goals: 1.Blow up Bison’s fortress. 2. Pair off some of the characters so that more than an hour into the film we finally get at least a couple of what might in some way vaguely approximate street fights. 3. Come up with some really flimsy excuses to get every cast member into the costumes they have in the games. The first of these goals goes off well and is easily accomplished by the AN forces, seemingly requiring almost no effort whatsoever. It’s the other two of these goals that fall flat.
E. Honda faces Zangief in an idiotic Godzilla homage for the sake of a bad joke, Vega finally fights Ryu and we get to witness the world’s least exciting hadouken, Ken fights Sagat because de Souza must not have been paying much attention to the games, and most importantly of all Guile fights Bison. This is the only halfway decent combat in the entire movie, but it’s very short and incompetently choreographed. First Guile takes Bison apart in just a few quick kicks, then after his suit revives him Bison wrecks Guile with his magnetism before quickly being blown up. Much of this excitement is undercut by editing their fight together with other sequences, but even without this their minute and a half of blows didn’t even hold up well in 1994. For audiences hoping for quality Van Damme-style fighting, this is the biggest disappointment of the whole movie.
De Souza’s ridiculous need for people to wear their in-game costumes culminates with the last shot of the movie, in which nearly every character poses together in the game’s win scene for a truly awful shot of unmotivated campiness. This moment makes every serious line-reading of the preceding hour and forty-five minutes seem idiotic, since seemingly the whole goal of things wasn’t to make a compelling movie, or even to show some street fighting, but to have a group of costumed adults strike a cartoon pose. Yes, de Souza managed to pull off this ridiculous stunt in a semi-believable manner, but goddamn is that a pyrrhic victory.
Street Fighter went over with critics just as well as Super Mario Bros., if not worse, but it isn’t the critics who Hollywood listens to but rather the box office results. Made for $35 million, the film grossed $33.4 million domestically and another $66 million overseas, meaning that for the first time a video game adaptation not only recouped its expenses but even turned a profit. Its marketing budget certainly cut into that, but it was still a success and prospects for a true sequel lingered for years. What it wasn’t, though, was a blockbuster, despite the Street Fighter franchise’s popularity at the time. While a Mortal Kombat film was already in production (Van Damme actually turned it down in favor of Street Fighter), its disappointment signaled an overall drought in adaptations for the rest of the decade. Today the film’s biggest claim to fame is that it isn’t quite as awful as Street Fighter’s second live-action adaptation, 2009’s The Legend of Chun-Li, but that’s some faint praise indeed.
A particular oddity of the Street Fighter movie are the games that resulted from it, a circular case in which a game is based on a movie based on a game, which might have been a unique accomplishment if there weren’t two of these. Making things even more unnecessarily unclear, both games are titled Street Fighter: The Moviedespite not being, you know, movies. Both games used digitized images of the actors that were recorded during filming in what seems to have been an attempt to compete with the Mortal Kombat series in the digitized fighting game genre. They’re also fairly different from one another in many respects, but both look really stupid in action and for some reason work Captain Sawada into their fighting rosters, which was really what everyone was clamoring for in a Street Fighter game.
Next time we’ll take a short break from literal game adaptations to explore the original Tron, and we’ll see what happens when you try to make a film about computer games largely out of hand-animation and Styrofoam suits.