Yesssss!
-Roger Ebert, for the Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1997
I’ve watched 27 hours of Street Fighter: The Movie. That’s a low estimate, because I stopped counting rewatches at sixteen. Somewhere around the eleven count, I promised myself I’d review it every time. Today I was blessed with the opportunity to expose a friend of a half-decade to (unfortunately) my favorite movie. Consider this an effort to right my wrongs.
Let’s talk about Raul Julia. You want me to talk about Raul Julia. You’ve seen the clips, you’ve seen “it was Tuesday”. Quoth friend: that’s where it’s from!?
Julia’s outstanding ham as M. Bison won him a Saturn Award, which is the best thing to happen to both Street Fighter and the Saturn Awards. He was an actor of uncommon power everywhere he went. But he did go a specific place: Shadaloo. Can’t chew scenery without scenery.
It was a hard choice between screenshoting this and the John Wayne Gacy Bison. Also in this scene, the best visual gag: Bison steps behind a pingfeng to swap his trademark dictator cap for a silk version of the same. It’s Saturday morning cartoon schlock from people who wished their favorite shows growing up had the budget to animate jokes.
A common epithet leveled towards Street Fighter is that it’s “so bad it’s good”. This category I reject unto death. Bad movies are, much more simply, so bad they’re bad: Shallow Hal, Burton’s Planet of the Apes, the first Friday the 13th. Featuring shoddy acting, revolting ideology, forgettable/incoherent cinematography, self/unseriousness, and a generalized failure of artistic X-factor, true bad movies are plain not worth watching.
After (maybe) more than twenty rewatches, I am disenchanted with Street Fighter. You will not catch me calling it good. But it is worth watching on its own merits. What we refer to as “so bad it’s good” is the tension between Street Fighter’s bad and good elements. Fighting out of the blue corner, Raul Julia, theatrical set and costume design, a bombastic combination of bespoke orchestral and Ice Cube. Opposing them, the NATO-jingoist screenwriter of Die Hard, Capcom demands to write in every character from Street Fighter II, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Van Damme is Stephen E. De Souza’s poetic punishment. His character sports a US flag tattoo and he still can’t play a convincing American. Production tales have him on a coke bender, cheating on his wife and mangling the pronunciation of “Ryu”. He sounds like he has a different Belgian stuck in his throat. He’s reading off a teleprompter in another galaxy.
And he is the perfect foil to Raul Julia. Van Damme’s Guile only meets Bison at the halfway point, but they’re in communication from the start. Julia watches Van Damme’s big stupid mug flip him off on a news broadcast. In retaliation he threatens to kill a bunch of hostages. Van Damme says things like “this war isn’t about your personal vendetta”; Julia says “RAISE THE INCUBATION CHAMBER!”
I have made a lot of lists in this article. Distinct bullet points of good and bad. Truth is, movies are a hollistic whole. That’s where the tension that makes Street Fighter unique and irreplicable lives, in the coherent aggregate. Raul Julia’s last line on The Movie, indeed, any movie, is a nonsequitur paraphrase of Luke 10:18. He rolls the nouns around with maniacal delight (“frrrrom heaven... like LIGHTNING!”) while flying into the air thanks to the power of superconductor electromagnetism. Then he does his move from the game, the one where he flies across. Van Damme hits him with another move from the game and says “Bison! You’re off the air!”, and it sounds, thank god, like shit.