When Hollywood’s live-action film adaptation of Street Fighter came out in 1994, I remember enjoying it quite a bit. Sure, critics thought the film was terrible, but that was typical of video game movies of the era…and of video game movies now, come to think of it. I had also enjoyed the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo the year prior, but that's a whole other topic. As a kid growing up in the 90’s, I was really into Street Fighter II back in the day. Fighting games had come to dominate arcades and SF2 in particular had really captured my young imagination. Oh right, yeah, and I guess I was also 11 years old.

Young Luke was probably more obsessed with Street Fighter than most other kids. According to my cousin Sarah, I spent an entire summer with SF2 on the Super Nintendo, practicing the inputs for special moves in order to play more competitively against Mike. She would come by our house after morning piano lessons, but instead of playing outside, I would apparently refuse to leave the attic, so intent was I on mastering Ryu’s hadouken and shoryuken. While her anecdote seems a bit exaggerated, I do remember this happening at least once or twice.

So we definitely went to see the Street Fighter movie in theaters back in the day. Then, when it was released on VHS, we absolutely rented it from the video store, probably multiple times. I bought a bunch of the SF toys, which were made as a special line G.I. Joes. Excited as I was to have a Ryu or Ken or Chun-Li action figure, it was a bit disappointing that these versions feel like G.I. Joe guys and not really the characters from the video games. (More on that later.) Watching the SF movie and seeing how Ken’s hair was cut short in live-action, I’m pretty sure helped convince me to cut my long hair at the time. For a year or so I had sported a MacGyuver-esque mullet—part of my attempts to look like Gambit—and after watching the SF VHS at home, I decided it was time to forgo the “party in the back”.

Ok, so with all the waxing nostalgic about the Jean-Claude Van Damme Street Fighter movie I’m doing here, one would presume that I love this film, right? Well no, I concede that it is a fairly mediocre action movie. Perhaps one might consider it a form of high camp—a “so bad, it’s good” situation—but I don’t think it quite rises to that level. It is a decently fun popcorn flick, and I could recommend it as a family-friendly B-movie for casual viewing.

Even with his health failing, no one out acts Raul Julia.

That said, I would never recommend the movie to a fan of the games because it doesn’t really feel like Street Fighter. At least, not the SF we all know and love.

You see, this film feels like it should have been a live-action G.I. Joe movie. The existing G.I. Joe toyline makes the comparison even more obvious, but the roles of Guile, M. Bison, and Sagat map pretty seamlessly onto Duke, Cobra Commander, and Destro. There is no tournament bringing the best martial arts together from around the world in this Street Fighter film; in fact, there is almost no street fighting. Instead you have a ruthless dictator hellbent on world domination and the peacekeeping forces of the UN…oh, I mean the AN (Allied Nations)...sent into Southeast Asia to defeat him. The mission will, of course, necessitate an infiltration of/military assault on the dictator’s hidden secret base, like something out of a James Bond movie. A brave army of international soldiers going up against a villainous army of masked stormtroopers led by a deranged madman.

Ryu and Ken: serious martial artists or simple conmen?

Thankfully, there is some hand-to-hand combat sprinkled throughout the movie. However, the fights are largely unimpressive, with seemingly minimal fight choreography. There are arguably more shootouts and military operations depicted here. When you hear stories that most of the cast didn’t have enough time to train for their roles, and that a lot of fights barely got choreographed right before shooting, it explains why the movie is severely lacking in street fights. Moreover, there is a real dearth of recognizable special moves from the game. Sure, there are a couple that got thrown in, and a couple “squint and you can see it” halfhearted attempts, but almost nothing distinctive from SF2 made the transition to film here.

The real problem with this Street Fighter movie is that its characters simply are not the characters we know from the video game. The movie’s cast is almost entirely different to the SF2 roster from which they were derived. Almost none of the characters in the movie are portrayed as being martial artists first and foremost, with everyone getting shoehorned into a tertiary role for the military scenario—soldier, weapons dealer, conman, hacker, scientist, journalist/secret assassin.

Obviously casting Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile raised some eyebrows, especially because the all-American fighter pilot would now speak with a virtually indecipherable Belgian accent. He also doesn’t fly a jet in the movie, but a boat instead. Sure, it’s a stealth boat for some reason, but a boat nonetheless. But the alterations made to Guile were really the tip of the creative license iceberg.

Ryu and Ken are conmen who hustle gangsters, and no one pronounces Ryu’s name correctly. (No wonder we all called him “Rai-yu” for so long.) Deejay is an expert hacker working for Bison. Dhalsim is a scientist. Sagat is an arms dealer. Balrog is a good guy, working as a cameraman for Chun-Li. Zangief is a bad guy, working as a hencheman for Bison. Fei Long doesn’t get included at all, being replaced instead by Japanese actor Kenya Sawada playing an original character for this movie, creatively named “Captain Sawada”. The characters of Blanka and Charlie are combined into one guy in order to give Guile a personal connection to the green beastman. Edmond Honda, SF2’s true Japanese cultural representative, is now Hawaiian. The great Wes Studi plays Sagat, but he’s a Native American of the Cherokee Nation, so not Thai. And Kylie Minogue is Australian, not British. (Just kidding, nobody cared about that one.)

Upon rewatching the movie, it’s really striking how extremely good both Ming-Na Wen and Kylie Minogue are in their roles. Few actors in this movie resemble the characters from the game, but Chun-Li and Cammy certainly do—Vega also looks pretty good, although he doesn’t wear his mask enough—and their performances outdo most of their male counterparts. These two seem like the best casting choices in this movie…well, outside of Raul Julia of course! His take on M. Bison is boldly original and, while not what any of us would have expected from the source material, is executed so masterfully, it’s almost transcendent.

Kind of like how the United Nations gets a fictional analogue in this movie, it’s funny to me how Shadaloo—M. Bison’s expansive criminal organization in the Street Fighter universe—is used as a stand-in name for anything specific to Asia. In this movie, Shadaloo is a country, a paramilitary force, a tong (or gang) distinct from the paramilitary force, a mountain range, and probably some other stuff I didn’t catch. The war isn’t happening in Thailand or Laos or Cambodia, it’s in Shadaloo. And the capital certainly isn’t Bangkok, it’s Shadaloo City. Ok, whatever.

Fun Fact: Street Fighter was written and directed by Steven E. de Souza, the screenwriter of Diehard. This was his first time directing a movie though, which maybe contributed to the myriad of problems the studio had making the production work.

Ironically, the script is actually a lot better than I remember. Which is to say, much of the dialogue is pretty good. Granted, there are some incredibly dumb lines and some bits are quite difficult to understand. But there are some genuinely funny lines and some insanely quotable moments too. For example, Sagat’s line, “Surely you aren’t afraid of your own weapons” is unbelievably dumb. Dhalsim’s final line, “For good men to do nothing is evil enough” is poignant and just too good for this schloch. And of course, Bison’s line, “For me, it was Tuesday” is something we all still quote to this day.

It seems like most of the dialogue in this movie was re-recorded later in ADR. I didn’t notice this with any of Raul Julia’s lines, but almost everyone else seems to have had to ADR some line or another. Van Damme in particular probably needed to re-record almost everything. Speaking of JCVD, he does quite well as the lead of this G.I. Joe-esque campy movie. He’s got a ton of swagger and—say what you will about his English—his martial arts ability was incredible. Seriously, his kicks look amazing in this movie. Hopefully his performance was worth the coked-fueled antics had put the cast and crew through during the shoot.

Some random thoughts:

There is a scene with a brief death fake-out involving Guile, Chun-Li, and a bedsheet. In this case, Guile is playing dead, lying still with a sheet over his body, until he surprises Chun-Li by pulling off the sheet and sitting up, alive and well. This is mainly notable because an eerily similar scene will come up in the next SF movie we look at. But also…we he just waiting there for her the whole time? It must have been hours since he was shot, right?
I liked that Bison’s control panel is a SF2 arcade joystick and buttons, that’s fun. However, having someone play a video game in a video game adaptation movie is just so tired and dull, I was less impressed with that.
Zangief and Deejay as Bison’s goons are genuinely hilarious. Zangief gets to the two funniest lines in the movie and Deejay excels in playing the exasperated straightman to Julia’s Bison antics.
Framing Zangeif and Honda’s fight as a kaiju battle was a good gag.
The soundtrack features Ice Cube, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, plus MC Hammer and Deion Sanders with the unforgettable song “Straight To My Feet”. Chage & Aska even provide a song that kicks off the end credits. Nice to see some Japanese tunes in there.
I had forgotten about the post-credits scene where Bison’s hand reaches out from under rubble (Shredder in TMNT 2-style) to signify that the villain is still alive.

Ultimately I think Street Fighter (1994) is a decent little popcorn movie, a campy and family-friendly action flick. As a movie standing on its own merits, it is messy and ridiculous, but a fun romp nonetheless. Judged as a martial arts movie, on the other hand, it doesn’t hold up nearly as well, because most of its fight scenes are just a disappointment.

And finally, as a video game adaption, this movie fails rather spectacularly. Because fans of the game know Street Fighter, we definitely know Street Fighter’s characters, and we can’t help but recognize this simply isn’t it. They strayed rather far from the source material for the movie and made something original, so kudos to them for the effort. But this isn’t the Street Fighter movie we were looking for, not by a long shot.