Posted By Dan Greenfield on Dec 23, 2024 | 3 comments

REEL RETRO CINEMA: A 30th ANNIVERSARY appreciation for a movie that’s better than you remember…

By ROB KELLY

When I sat down in the movie theater on December 23, 1994 — 30 years ago — to watch Street Fighter, I had absolutely no expectations.

Actually, that’s not strictly true—I knew I was seeing a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, and I had seen a few of his movies already and been generally unimpressed, so I wasn’t expecting anything more from one of his movies that was also based on a video game. But having never played the game, I had no particular affection for, or fealty to, the trappings and lore of the source material. So I wouldn’t be judging Street Fighter the way I would a comic book movie.

Since it’s many years and even more movies later, I can’t recall my reaction to the film as it unspooled before me, other than it was a cheap-looking piece of junk, easily watched and even more easily forgotten. The friends I saw it with, big fans of the game, hated it. I went on with my life, and promptly never gave Street Fighter a second thought. (Fun Fact: After just one more trip to the movies, I went and saw Before Sunrise, which would go on to become my favorite film of all time, pretty much blotting out the memories of every mediocre or worse movie seen just before or after)

Flash forward to September 2024, and I was going through the filmography of the late, great Raul Julia for that month’s episode of my podcast Fade Out. Not only was Julia’s premature death a tragedy, but also his final movie, after a lifetime of great work, was Street Fighter. The film fates can be so cruel sometimes.

So I sat down, 30 years later, to rewatch Street Fighter. And you know what? I really liked it. Yes, it’s clearly a fairly cheap-looking production. Yes, it still stars Jean-Claude Van Damme, who (for me) is devoid of much charm or magnetism as a leading man. But something I hadn’t appreciated then that I did this time, was that Street Fighter is completely in on the joke. It knows how silly this all this, and it plays into that in ways I had completely forgotten about and genuinely made me laugh out loud.

Written and directed by Steven E. de Souza (screenwriter of 48 Hrs., The Running Man, and a little thing called Die Hard), Street Fighter sets up its story quickly, efficiently, and, dare I say, cleverly: In the Southeast nation of Shadaloo, a civil war breaks out between the forces of would-be dictator General Bison (Julia) and the Allied Nations, led by Col. William Guile (Van Damme) and his team of freedom fighters. Among other things, we get cameos by real life newsman Sander Vanocer setting up the world of Street Fighter via newsreel footage, as well as some voiceover from Vietnam-era DJ Adrian Cronauer (the subject of 1987’s Good Morning, Vietnam, played by Robin Williams) crooning, “Gooooooood morning, Shadaloo!” Just a few minutes into this movie, and I was on board.

Another element that went past me in 1994 but worked this time was Raul Julia’s performance as Bison. Julia had died just before the film’s release (it ends with a dedication to him), and it was shocking how ill he looked throughout the movie. I remember being distracted by it, and the notion that this wonderful actor was ending his career this way. But with the benefit of distance, and having researched Julia for my podcast, I can see why he did the movie. By the 1990s, Julia had small children and, once he learned he was ill, wanted to provide for them after he was gone—a completely understandable, laudable goal. Also, his kids loved the Street Fighter game, and he wanted to be in something they could enjoy (I guess they weren’t into Kiss of the Spider Woman). Knowing all this, you can plainly see that Raul Julia wanted to have his very own General Zod—a big, over the top, hissable villain performance on his resume. Who wouldn’t?

It’s clear that Julia is having a blast as Bison—he gets to murder his enemies in delightfully dramatic ways, luxuriate in a fascist’s dream pad (complete with a John Wayne Gacy original on the wall), and, when showing off a diorama of the future home of Bisonopolis, gets to deliver lines like, “We should make the food court a little bigger.” After he kidnaps Chun-Li (played by Ming Na Wen), she delivers a heartfelt speech about how Bison slaughtered her entire town and how that day transformed her into the seeker of truth and freedom she is now. Bison merely shrugs and says, “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”

All that said, Street Fighter is no overlooked classic. Director de Souza is clearly doing his best with a limited budget and a… less than agreeable star. JCVD’s behavior on the set was pretty abominable, causing multiple productions delays for a movie whose budget was already stretched thin. When Bison kidnaps another one of Guile’s crew and has him turned into a super soldier, the effect is laughably cheap, the end result looking like something out of The Incredible Hulk TV series. One wonders what could have been achieved if the film had starred, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a concomitant budget.

Despite all these hurdles, Street Fighter ended up being a pretty big box office success (I guess my friends and I were part of that). It also did well on home video and Street Fighter’s owner, Capcom, claims the film still rakes in millions of yen each year. (Below is a photo of the Capcom accounting department at the end of every fiscal quarter)

While I may have been there for the movie, something that passed me by entirely was the one-shot comics adaptation published by DC, which hit store shelves the same week as the film. Drawn by Nick Napalitano and Bob Downs, and written by Mike McAvennie, the one-shot (oddly named Street Fighter: The Battle for Shadaloo in the indicia) is 60 pages of teeth-gritting, bone-breaking, glass-shattering action action action, bearing none of the wit of the film that I thought made it so fun to watch.

This was, of course, right in the heart of the Extreme!!! ’90s, so it’s not surprising that a comic book adapting a movie adapting a video game would eschew subtlety and go for lots and lots of fighting, much of it on streets. The comic, strangely, does not end with the movie’s gloriously cheesy hero team shot, which is as comic book-y a moment as you’ll ever see in live action. Seems like a real missed opportunity.

As is often the case with comic book adaptations of films, the creators are working from either the shooting script or a very rough cut of the movie. To that end (no pun intended), Street Fighter the comic features the film’s original post-credits “sting,” where we learn Col. Bison has indeed survived and laughs, Ming the Merciless-style, promising to fight another day. Steven de Souza felt it was inappropriate given Raul Julia’s passing and removed it, only reinstating it for home video.

Part of the fun built in to my Fade Out podcast is that it allows me to revisit some films in that month’s subject’s filmography. Movies don’t change, but people do—hopefully for the better. So it was really rewarding to revise my opinion about Raul Julia’s cinematic swan song. Instead of thinking, gee, what a sad end to a great career, I look at Street Fighter now as a great actor getting a chance to have some scenery-chewing fun, and appearing in something his kids probably had a ball watching their Dad be a part of. That’s a better legacy than a lot of movies ever earn.

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MORE

— BUCKAROO BANZAI: A 40th Anniversary Salute to Anarchic Film Magic. Click here.

— BRENDA STARR: The Movie That Didn’t Do Right by DALE MESSICK or RAMONA FRADON. Click here.

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ROB KELLY is a podcaster, writer, and film commentator. His work can be found at robkellycreative.com.