Haha, Streetfighter, one of the best bad movies of all time, peak mid-90s video game-to-big screen adaptation nonsense, and Jean Claude Van Damme at his most spectacularly coked up. Shockingly, it’s also the last onscreen appearance of legendary Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia before his untimely death in 1994, and perhaps even more shockingly, it isn’t the first onscreen appearance of Kylie Minogue, who apparently already had some acting experience prior to the car crash of a performance that she serves up here.
And yet, for all its many, many faults, Streetfighter remains authentically entertaining from start to finish – provided, of course, that it’s consciously viewed as a camp comedy and even a sendup, which I have to assume was the intention of its progenitors.
The movie takes place in the fictional Southeast Asian country of Shadaloo, which is ruled with an iron fist by the megalomaniacal General M. Bison (Julia) as a personal fiefdom for running drugs, guns, and extorting world governments. In the first scene, Bison takes a group of hostages from the “Allied Nations” (basically the U.N.) and demands 20 billion dollars for their safe return, Dr. Evil-style, while a contingent of A.N. troops under the leadership of Colonel William Guile (Van Damme) is tasked with freeing them.
Guile’s rescue mission is complemented by several preposterous and unintelligible subplots. In Shadaloo City, bumbling con-artists Ryu (Byron Mann) and Ken (Damian Chapa) attempt to sell fake weapons to Victor Sagat (Wes Studi), Bison’s principal ally and arms dealer. They are captured, but before Sagat can string them up, Guile bursts in on a tank and arrests everyone. He recruits Ryu and Ken to infiltrate Sagat’s operation and bring a homing device to Bison’s headquarters, so that the A.N. can locate the hostages. To make matters even more complicated, a small group of vengeful vigilantes led by Chun-Li Zang (Ming-Na Wen) also attempt to locate Bison’s headquarters, in order to exact retribution for various poorly defined reasons.
In the end, these different “narrative threads” culminate in a final confrontation at Bison’s lair, which looks very much like the set of hit mid-90s TV show Gamesmaster. Once the homing device is in place, Guile and his lovely assistant Cammie (Minogue) enact an “undercover amphibious landing” in a “stealth boat” which has Guile’s name and a star-spangled banner discreetly emblazoned across the side of it. Everyone takes the opportunity to change into cosplay outfits from the video game, the good guys rescue the hostages and fight their way through an inexhaustible army of singularly incompetent minions, while Guile and Bison lube up for their inevitable one-on-one showdown amidst the smoldering wreckage of the General’s home cinema.
Of course it’s bad, daytime television levels of bad. The award for most entertainingly shambolic performance is a nail-biting contest between the utterly unconvincing and uncharismatic Minogue, the hilariously hammy Ming-Na Wen, and the high school talent show-woodenness of Grand L. Bush’s Balrog. Van Damme’s English, an impediment to his believability at the best of times, frequently borders on incomprehensible, while Ryu and Ken’s loveable rogue double act is supremely irritating from start to finish. That said, Raul Julia is (unironically) inspired as the moustache-twiddling Bison, and presumably he wrote most of his own lines, given the gulf in quality between those and the rest of the script.
But perhaps both the funniest and most lamentable aspect of Street Fighter is the premise. The video game was already based on early Van Damme tournament fighting films such as Bloodsport and Kickboxer, which comprised simple storylines set in exotic locations, so you’d think that the story would write itself. But instead of taking this path of least resistance, the writers elected to embark on an unintelligible Moonraker-style action-sci-fi mastodon with levitating supervillains, underground lairs, and pitched gunbattles featuring vast armies of evil minions who prove risibly incapable of shooting anything.
Who made that call and why? We’ll never know, but in the end, it’s probably for the best that the makers of Street Fighter didn’t attempt a competent-but-bland rehashing of Van Damme’s greatest hits, because the world would be a glummer place without the resulting glorious mess.
Overall rating: * * * * *