Street Fighter (1994) is more of a light-hearted fun movie than what we normally get from Jean-Claude Van Damme. It’s not strictly a comedy, but it has some great moments of humour. The violence is also toned down, making it more suitable for children. It’s like a cross between a classic Van Damme movie, and something from Marvel or DC universe.
Raul Julia (who played Gomez Addams in the Addams Family movies of the 90s) does a good job as General M Bison, the larger-than-life cape-wearing comicbook-style supervillain with tech-based superpowers (fighting ability, tesla beams from hands, automatic self revival kit, flying boots, etc). Apparently, he wasn’t sure about the role until he mentioned it to his kids and saw the look on their faces – they were very excited because they were keen players of the Street Fighter video game. Raul Julia even had stomach cancer while filming this movie, and died within 6 months of the movie’s release date. He turned up to filming while very underweight, which he pretended was due to getting sick while filming in Brazil recently. The writer & director Steven E De Souza (who wrote many massive action movies of the 80s and 90s including Die Hard, Judge Dredd, Commando, The Running Man, etc) moved all but one scene of Raul Julia’s forward to give him time to gain weight.
Ming-Na Wen does a good job as Chun-Li, the reporter with secret ninja skills, on a vendetta to take out the supervillain.
Many other cast members also give decent performances here.
Van Damme and Kylie
The main hero of this movie, Colonel William F Guile, is played quite well by Jean-Claude Van Damme. His sidekick, Military intel officer and aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Cammy White, is played quite jovially by the beautiful Kylie Minogue (in her mid 20s) who Van Damme had an affair with while making this movie – something rumoured for a long time, which he eventually admitted to publicly in 2012.
Van Damme and Kylie made a lovely couple, so it’s sad that they never stayed together, although it wasn’t practical since he was married to the model & stripper Darcy LaPier (in her late 20s) who was pregnant with his son Nicholas at the time. Darcy was also credited with a minor role in this movie, allegedly playing “Guile’s date”, although I didn’t spot where this was in the movie – maybe it didn’t make the edit I saw. Van Damme’s relationship with Darcy also began as an affair while she was married to Ron Rice (founder of Tropic Thunder sun cream) and Van Damme was married to bodybuilder Gladys Portugues with whom he had two children and later remarried and is still officially with today (although simultaneously having long-term relationships with other women, most notably Alena Kaverina). So I guess, for Darcy, what goes around comes around. She cheated with a cheater, then got cheated on by him. Live by the sword, die by the sword! Anyway, back to the movie…
Street Fighter vs Mortal Kombat
It’s ironic that Van Damme took the lead role in the Street Fighter (1994) movie, which is based on a classic video game that began in 1987, when two years prior to this movie being released, an equally classic rival video game series called Mortal Kombat was created (in 1992) by a rival studio, based mainly on the idea of Van Damme being a key character in that game (called Johnny Cage). Van Damme turned down the role of Johnny Cage in the Mortal Kombat video games (which also went on to make some great movies), however the game still featured Johnny Cage who continued to be based on Van Damme (with a few small changes for legal purposes), then Van Damme agreed to take the lead role in Street Fighter! Maybe he regretted turning down the role in Mortal Kombat after seeing how popular it became, although he was stuck in a non-compete contract with a different video game, so I guess when he was free 2 years later he jumped at the chance to take on a similar role to what he missed out on. Unfortunately for him, while Street Fighter was a massive hit in the arcades, it was never based on Van Damme the way Mortal Kombat intended to be, and it was also never so serious about movies even though it made plenty of them. I may be biased as someone who played a lot of Mortal Kombat, and never Street Fighter, but as far as I see it, Mortal Kombat has much cooler and more memorable characters, making it far more crossover-friendly for the big screen.
In summary
All in all, due to it’s consistent albeit shallow level of entertainment value, I rate Street Fighter (1994) an OK movie, alongside most of Van Damme’s other movies, which generally all offer a respectable level of entertainment for fans of his work. It’s not quite pushing into the upper-average level of his filmography, where stronger movies like Inferno and Assassination Games exist, and it’s far from the higher levels of screenplay where rock solid films like Bloodsport, The Quest, Kickboxer and Hard Target are ranked. But it’s a mildly entertaining fun movie nevertheless.