Street Fighter (1994)

Street Fighter features many of the characters from the game and some of them hit the mark. Many of them don't. And for years, I wrote the film off. I wondered, why did they pick Raul Julia to play M. Bison? After finally watching it, I now know that no one else could have played him.How much do you really love the game? Then you'll probably hate how idiotic Ken and Ryu are. You'll probably dislike that E. Honda isn't Japanese. And you'll have trouble with the fact that Dhalism is a scientist and that Charlie and Blanka have been turned into the same character.But if you can get away from that, you pretty much get a live action cartoon. There's a great scene where E. Honda and Zangief (Andrew Bryniarski, Leatherface in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) have a fight while Godzilla sound effects play. Kylie Minogue is great as Cammy, even if her costumes are a little more modest than the video game. Wes Studi makes a fine Sagat. And the fights are really fun.Best of all, Julia really makes M. Bison sing. There's a great scene of him trying to seduce Chun Li in his chambers and he has a portrait done of him by John Wayne Gacy. And he brings a Shakespearean gravitas to a role that a lesser actor would not work hard on at all. The fact that he was suffering from stomach cancer (he died two months before the movie was released) is amazing when you see how much he put into his performance.Street Fighter was the first movie that Steven de Souza directed. Up to then, he'd been better known as a writer, working on films as diverse as 48 Hours, The Return of Captain Invincible, Commando, The Running Man, Bad Dreams, Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Hudson Hawk. He was beholden to a really rough schedule while working on the film, as Capcom had a hard and fast date that he had to hit. That said - he succeeds in making a silly take on the franchise. There's even a Goofy falling sound effect made by one of the enemy soldiers!

What's not to like about this movie? Well, there's a lot actually. Like the characters, the music, etc. But because it's so terrible, it's what makes it such a fun, enjoyable movie. I've only played one of the Street Fighter games, that being the fourth one. So I watched this film not really expecting a faithful adaptation, but a fun, entertaining mess. The action sequences are so terribly amazing, the characters are laughably cheesy, the acting is so laughably awkward, and the movie has a very frail Raul Julia as Bison. Definitely a guilty pleasure movie at best. The final fight scene was pretty cool and I did like how they added the cliche of the main character supposedly be dead, but when he's really alive. A fun movie! If you like a good guilty pleasure movie, this might be the film for you. If you are a big fan of the video games, you're gonna really hate this movie.

I really wanted this movie to be great. I watched it so many times as a child and the game was so good and add to that a story and cool fighting scenes that in just some ways tried to resemble the moves from the game.Unfortunately, going back and revisiting this movie as an adult just hurts. It's pure garbage and it's just indefensible how this was even watchable as a kid. I'm disappointed in this movie, but even more so in myself for thinking this was a really cool movie.It tries, it really does, and I give it credit for this by adding an extra star, but more than 2 is really pushing it.

Col. Guile and various other martial arts heroes fight against the tyranny of Dictator M. Bison and his cohorts. The first and 2nd act of this film was very cheesy and boring and i almost felt asleep and Jean Claude Van Damme's character didn't grow on me but the final act of the film the 3rd act was easily the best one there was a lot of action and fight sequences and the film became even more cheesy with 2 huge dudes going against each other and godzilla sounds can be heard on the back ground or even Bison gets powers and turns into Nuclear Man meets Magneto. This film has over the top acting, it's dumb and it's pretty cheesy as f*ck but overall it's a really good guilty pleasure and i'm gonna give it an 6/10