The Old ‘Street Fighter’ Movie Is Actually Good

I don’t have a lot of memories from my childhood birthdays. But I vividly remember my 14th birthday party.

My parents took me and a dozen or so of my best buddies to Movie City 5 in East Brunswick, NJ to see Street Fighter. For a video-game loving child of the 1990s, the Street Fighter movie was a pop-culture event somewhere on magnitude of a Squid Game/Stranger Things crossover. This wasn’t just exciting; it was important. It was the culmination of something. It was an action movie starring one of the hottest action stars at the time, Jean-Claude Van Damme, plus the great Raul Julia, a favorite amongst ’90s kids thanks to the two live-action Addams Family movies, as M. Bison.

And the Street Fighter movie was written and directed by Steven E. de Souza, the guy who wrote Commando, Die Hard, and The Running Man. It was like God himself had seen it in His almighty beneficence to create a movie as a birthday gift for me personally. There was no conceivable scenario where Street Fighter didn’t instantly become an all-time favorite.

Or so me and my buddies thought. I remember the movie, but what I really remember is the drive home from the theater, in which a bunch of befuddled high-school freshman all simultaneously came to the stunning realization that a movie they really wanted to see could turn out to be a total piece of s—.

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Julia was sort of funny, we all agreed, but what was going on with Van Damme? Some of the characters looked reasonably close to their counterparts from the game, but others were just … odd. (Who was the shrimp who played Ken? Why was Chun-Li a TV reporter? Why did Dhalsim have clothes and hair?!?) The film’s plot involved a civil war in the Asian nation of “Shadaloo.” The street-fighting tournament of the game was nowhere to be seen.

Accordingly, while the film concluded with a Street Fighter II-esque brawl between Van Damme’s Guile and Julia’s Bison, the film wasn’t exactly the non-stop martial-arts spectacular we expected. The fights was intermittent during the first two acts, and a lot of them were brief and awkwardly assembled. (It’s always a good sign when your movie has five credited editors, right? Quantity over quality!) Forget about de Souza’s action movies, my peer group had already discovered Jackie Chan, John Woo, and the burgeoning world of ’90s Hong Kong action. Compared to the caliber of martial arts we’d come to expect by the mid-’90s, Street Fighter just didn’t measure up.

The world largely agreed. The film did okay at the box office but was lambasted by critics. It went down in history, along with Super Mario Bros., as the early proof that Hollywood did not understand video games and was utterly incapable of successfully adapting one to film. 30 years later, Paramount has produced a full-scale Street Fighter reboot, one that at least based on the first trailer, really embraces the game’s fight-heavy structure and colorful 16-bit aesthetics.

The excitement around the new Street Fighter’s first teaser and over-the-top (but game accurate) character designs gave me the itch to revisit the 1994 film for the first time in a while. My expectation was I’d be groaning and laughing inside of ten minutes and eventually turn it off in favor of a better film.

That’s not what happened at all.

Okay, I did laugh — but mostly at material that was intended to be funny. Today you would never see a big-screen adaptation of a coveted IP with this much disdain for its source material. As a Street Fighter-loving kid, that annoyed me to no end. As an adult, I really admired de Souza’s IDGAF attitude toward the whole thing. He refused to take this nonsense seriously for even one single second, and all of the overt, intentional mockery of the concept played really well for me now — at least as compared to that first viewing 30 years ago. (Oy.)

The centerpiece of that material is Julia, who is great as M. Bison. Wikipedia (which is never wrong) tells me he took the role because his kids were Street Fighter II fans. That may be. But he was also totally on board with de Souza’s approach — namely to turn M. Bison in to a figure of outright comedy. Take, for instance, his line readings in this scene. (Also: Watch the way he replaces his work evil dictator hat for his casual evil dictator hat.)

Incredible stuff. There are only a few people in the history of cinema who could successfully deliver a line like “Tell you what: After I’ve crushed my enemies, we’ll see about getting you published. That should cheer you up, eh?” Raul Julia was one of them.

Did I mention M. Bison’s command console for world conquest looks like the Street Fighter II arcade cabinet? I had no memory of this, but boy did it make me laugh.

Van Damme is hilarious too, although admittedly that’s for more unintentional reasons. He uses this strange voice; very quiet and whispery, almost like a bad comedian’s impression of JCVD doing Dirty Harry.

It makes absolutely no sense … but when I noticed that Guile’s uniform has a big U.S. flag on the shoulder (he’s got a flag tattoo on his shoulder too), and I realized we’re meant to believe this man is a red-blooded American, I suddenly hit upon the notion that Van Damme thinks he’s speaking with an American accent. Which really unlocked the whole performance for me. (That final scene also shows that while the character designs weren’t strictly faithful, by the end of the movie most of the key Street Fighter II fighters had basically evolved into their signature looks.)

I do hope the new Street Fighter is good. I am sure it will take a more dutiful approach to its source material — as all adaptations of big IP do in the 2020s. The financial rewards of these projects are too enormous to task any risks whatsoever. When fans revolted against the look of Sonic the Hedgehog in the first Sonic movie trailer, and then Paramount responded by totally redesigning the character, and then the film became an enormous hit (with two sequels and a TV spinoff and counting), that doomed any chance of getting a weirdo, winking, self-satirizing adaptation like 1994’s Street Fighter any time soon.

Maybe that’s why I had such a positive reaction to the movie this time around. It’s got a very similar vibe to the 1960s Batman TV show, which embraced and also gently poked fun at the absurdity of its premise as well. And sure, if that was the only adaptation of Batman in live-action, maybe it would look a little smug and annoying. But in a world where there are half a dozen gruff big-screen Batmen to choose from, the Adam West Batman is a delightful alternative.

That’s how I look at Street Fighter (1994) now. Those who demand an “accurate” adaptation will have one next fall. The rest of us will have Raul Julia showing off briefcases full of money with his face on it, hissing lines like “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday!”