10 Things In Street Fighter (1994) That Got Better With Time

10 Things In Street Fighter (1994) That Got Better With Time

Street Fighter (1994) is one of those bad movies that continues to endure. Here are 10 things in this bad video game movie that aged perfectly.

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Let’s not kid ourselves: Street Fighter (1994) is bad. At best, it feels like an overblown Saturday Morning Cartoon come to life and at worst, it reinforces the argument that Hollywood should stop trying to adapt video games into cinema. And yet, Street Fighter is still celebrated as one of the greatest guilty pleasures ever made.

Even with the popularity of the games behind it, Street Fighter is the perfect example of a guilty pleasure, whose faults come off as more charming than infuriating. Here are 10 such things from the movie that only aged well with time and added to this strange movie’s appeal.

10 Bison Dollars & Bisonopolis

Bison is an egomaniac and a would-be dictator, and nothing embodies his delusions and inflated ego better than the fact that he printed a currency with his face on it in anticipation of his coming world domination. As silly as this gag is along with other details like Bison’s planned capital city appropriately named Bisonopolis, it makes a whole lot of sense for his character.

Dictators (or aspiring ones, in this case) are known to be full of themselves and incredibly petty, infecting every mundane detail of life with their visage. The mere existence of Bison Dollars (and Bison’s confidence to pay people with this currently useless denomination) speaks volumes.

9 The Glorious Camp

Street Fighter is often criticized for being too campy to taken seriously but really, what can you expect of a movie where a villainous would-be dictator challenges the world to a fist-fight in his evil island lair?

This movie is gloriously over the top and it’s hard not to enjoy it because of that – whether you watch it sincerely or ironically. The fact that Street Fighter revels in said camp instead of being smugly self-aware about some meta punchline only it knows adds to its enduring entertainment value. There’s just something irresistible about a movie that enjoys being silly.

8 Colonel Guile vs General M. Bison

There’s a lot of fights in Street Fighter but due to the technical limitations of the time, not all of them are great. Fun sure, but not as amazing even the simplest knife fight from The Raid 2: Berandal. The exception to this is the final fight between Guile and M. Bison, which while obviously choreographed and using stunt doubles, is still a campy good time.

From an airborne M. Bison yelling about how much of a god he is to Guile flexing his bicep with an American flag inked on it, everything about this final confrontation is perfectly cheesy. This clash of titans is the glorious kind of cheese you’d rarely see today, and it’s something to be cherished.

7 Bison Plays A Video Game

During Guile’s invasion on M. Bison’s fortress, the aspiring dictator unleashes his base’s greatest defense: an arcade control panel that’s directly lined up to some underwater mines and other such countermeasures.

This is possibly the most “video game” thing to occur in Street Fighter, and it’s as goofy as it sounds. M. Bison yelling “Game over!” upon (supposedly) beating Guile is just the cherry on top of this goofy sequence.

6 “Quick, Change The Channel!”

Truth be told, there are a lot of quotable lines in Street Fighter. While the most famous one are obvious (more on them later), one quip that gets overshadowed is Zangief’s reaction to seeing an explosive truck on the security footage. Intelligently, he suggests that his comrades change the channel so that the truck won’t crash into them.

Everything about this quick gag is perfect, from Zangief’s sincere belief that flipping channels was the right move along with the confused reactions of those around him. To his credit, Zangief was the only one to suggest something instead of staring blankly at the barreling truck.

5 “But For Me, It Was Tuesday”

Another great quote worth mentioning is M. Bison’s dismissal of Chun Li’s motive for revenge. After hearing her entire lifestory and how she intends to avenge her father, M. Bison confesses that he has no idea what she’s talking about because for him, the massacre of her village was just another day at work.

To this day, Bison’s cold admission remains one of the most revered villainous quotes ever uttered because of how classy yet undeniably evil it is. Raul Julia may be known for hamming it up for the cheesy Street Fighter, but his more restrained scenes carry an unforgettable impact.

4 Colonel Guile’s Rousing Speech

After the Allied Nations (AN) capitulates to Bison’s demands, they demand that Col. Guile and his forces stand down so that they could strike a deal with the warlord. Guile doesn’t like this one bit, so he delivers a sarcastic speech saying that it’s time to go home… only after he whoops Bison’s ass.

Granted, this is a simplistic clapback against a juvenile understanding of what the UN does, but it’s hard to decline the call of duty after hearing Van Damme declare war on Shadaloo and ask for reinforcements in his quest to kick ass.

3 Jean-Claude Van Damme as Col. Guile

Jean-Claude Van Damme is, without a doubt, one of the most famous actions stars to emerge from the ‘80s and ‘90s but even his star power couldn’t save Street Fighter from bombing. That’s not to say that his time as Col. Guile was his worst; in fact, some would say it’s his most memorable role, if not his best.

This is because, unintentionally, Col. Guile came off as a parody of every tough guy role that came to define Van Damme’s cinematic career. From his stilted cheesy one-liners to his unwavering bravado, Van Damme’s depiction of Guile stands the test of time not as a faithful interpretation, but as a fun pastiche of every ‘90s male action hero ever made.

2 The Cast’s Diversity

The Street Fighter games are famous for their diverse roster of fighters who hail from different parts of the world, and this was carried into the first live-action adaptation. While it may seem a bit mundane by today’s standards, this move was something ahead of its time back in the 90s. It’s important to note that Street Fighter came out when white men dominated the action scene, and yet this guilty pleasure did its source material justice by starring a diverse cast of actors in various important roles.

Each character gets a decent amount of time to shine and fight, and they’re all played well by their respective actors who all arguably steal some scenes from Van Damme. Some standouts include Ming-Na Wen as Chun-Li, Wes Studi as Sagat, and Andrew Bryniarski as Zangief. Did we also mention that none of these characters actually have a romantic subplot, as was common at the time? In a time when the bare minimum of representation is unjustly praised, this objectively bad movie shows just how effortlessly it can be done.

1 Raul Julia’s Final Performance

If this so-bad-it’s-good classic has one unanimously praised takeaway, it’s Raul Julia’s final performance as General M. Bison. At this point, it’s common knowledge that Julia was suffering from terminal cancer while filming Street Fighter, but he still gave the role his all because his children loved the games that much.

What may not be as well-known is that Julia treated what could’ve been a disposable B-grade villain with more effort than one would normally expect. To capture Bison’s egoistic persona, Julia combined his kids’ knowledge of the games and his own research on real-life dictators. As far as he was concerned, Bison was a self-absorbed megalomaniac on par with Richard III who deserved to be depicted as seriously as possible.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/street-fighter-movie-things-aged-well/

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