STREET FIGHTER
A film review by Rob Furr
Copyright 1994 Rob Furr
Mark Twain's (so, okay, Samuel Clemens') wife Livy was, as it happens, not terribly thrilled with her husband's tendency to swear. In one specific instance, the anecdote goes, Twain was alone in a room, and, if memory serves, injured himself. This served as the inspiration for a round of cursing of biblical proportions; he unburdened himself of a month's worth of profanity in seconds. After he wound down, he turned around and saw Livy standing in the door to the room. She stood there and, very carefully, repeated every word that Twain had uttered. Twain reportedly replied to this unemotional rendition of his poetic blasphemies with the sentence, "My dear, you may have the words, but you don't have the music."
STREET FIGHTER, the most recent of the new trend in martial-arts-for-the-kiddies movies, has the words ... has an awful lot of words, as a matter of fact ... but it simply does not have the music.
It has a respectable plot; power-mad dictator (Raul Julia, in his last role, doing a decent, but not, unfortunately, great, job as General Bison) is trying to take over first, a small Asian country, and second, the world, and everybody and his dog is either trying to help him to do it or stop him from doing it. Certain details are laughable (e.g., Bison has sixty-some hostages, for which he demands twenty billion dollars in ransom, and the other nations of the world are willing to *pay* that much. "Yeah," I said while watching, "Right.")
It has respectable actors ... amazingly enough, Van Damme, the biggest-name star (aside from Julia) in the film, has one of the smaller roles. The rest of the cast consists of second-rank actors who you *know* you've seen before, but can't remember from where, and, for the most part, they do a more than adequate job. Certain of them stand out ... the characters of Honda, Dee Jay, and Dhal Sim are above average in this regard.
It has decent production values; not great, but decent. The whiz-bang-on-the-cheap special effects that we've come to expect from this sort of film are, for the most part, missing, and the money saved from not trying to be the next Jurassic Park is applied rationally. Certain effects are rather rotten, to tell the truth. It took me more than half the movie to figure out that Bison's floating console was actually supposed to be floating (I'd assumed that, up to then, it was supposed to be on a crane or something,) for instance. However, the overall look of the movie is far superior to the last video-game-inspired movie (DOUBLE DRAGON. Of course, "America's Funniest Home Videos" usually looks better than DOUBLE DRAGON did. On the other hand, DOUBLE DRAGON was funnier than "AFHV" usually is, and had a better chase scene, so it averages out.)
It has, in short, pretty much all it needs. There are two detail-related problems with the movie, but it strives and almost overcomes them. The most significant problem with the film is that every STREET FIGHTER II character, whether from the original version, Special Championship version, Turbo, Super, or, for all I know, Tiger hand-held, gets a 'speaking' part. Some are larger than others; Vega doesn't actually speak, for instance ... but they're all in there. That fact tends to limit the amount of characterization and plot involvement available to any one character, which makes the entire movie oddly uninvolving. There's no central viewpoint character or set of characters that we can follow through the movie, and the resolution of any one character's story is less meaningful; the viewer only invested five minutes in Blanka's story, for instance, and four of those were spent watching him in a chair making faces at the camera - which makes it sort of hard to *care* what happens to him. The second problem is less major; it might even be a minor problem for anyone who's not as, er, anal, as I am. The military details are *laughable*, and, unfortunately, unintentionally so. A colonel is in charge of a company that's apparently effective enough to have complete control of a major seaport? A stealthed boat can't be seen on a TV screen? And so on and so forth; minor to others, annoying to me.
The key, major problem with STREET FIGHTER is that, even though it's competently made, even though the plot holds together reasonably well, even though it has decent performances, passable effects, snappy lines, hilarious scenes (listen carefully to the soundtrack when Honda and Zangreif are going at it,) it just never comes together into a seamless whole. Individual elements range from passable to great, but the collection of them looks more like Frankenstein's monster than Cindy Crawford. Possibly, if it had thrown most of the cast out, it could have spent the time made available on the cinematic equivalent of plastic surgery, but as it is, the assemblage may work, it may even entertain, but it's not what it could have been.
STREET FIGHTER is, at times, trying to be a martial-arts movie, and it succeeds, for the most part. It's not up to, say, ENTER THE DRAGON's standards, but then, what is? At other times, it's trying to be a believable thriller, and at other times than that, it wants to be the third act of a James Bond movie.
In short, it has the words, but it doesn't have the music.
On the Furr Scale, it's a 2.5-star three-star movie. (The Furr Scale (I'm *so* modest) rates movies on ambition as well as quality; clearly, ANIMAL HOUSE should not be judged on the same basis as THE LAST EMPEROR ... thus, ANIMAL HOUSE was, IMHO, a *great* B movie; in other words, a four-star two-star movie. THE LAST EMPEROR, on the other hand, was an average epic. (a two-star four-star movie.) Both ROBOCOP and TREMORS could be rated with three stars, but ROBOCOP was *trying* to be a three-star (or A) movie, while TREMORS was aiming squarely at the B movie (two-star) level, thus ROBOCOP is a three-star, three-star movie, and TREMORS was three-star two-star movie.)
Loosely translated, a 2.5-star three-star movie is "Go see it; you're not likely to do better this holiday season." In an otherwise lackluster session of movies, STREET FIGHTER by sheer virtue of not being boring, is therefore recommended. Just park your brain at the door, and try to read more into it than is actually there.
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