Friday 1 May 2015

Street Fighter (1994)



I saw this movie when it was in the cinemas, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  This is not because it is a good film, you understand.  It's not.  It's a terrible movie.  A gloriously terrible one.  As I watched, my jaw dropped - and kept dropping - as the script moved from bombastically stupid to "how drunk were they when they wrote this?"

I mean, one does not expect high art from a film that casts Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue as its leads, but this is the final shot of the movie:


Just what the heck is Van Damme doing?  And who is that guy on the far right?  I just watched this film and I don't remember him.

The premise of the film has an international military force (the "Allied Nations", since presumably the UN wanted nothing to do with this nonsense) entering the fictional South-East Asian country of Shadaloo to battle the forces of General M. Bison.  Said forces are totally not Cobra.  The makers of this film would like Hasbro to be really, really clear on that front.  Totally not Cobra.

After all, Cobra wear blue and these guys are in red.  No similarity at all.  Please ignore the fact that the script makes more sense (for certain definitions of "sense") if you find and replace all the Street Fighter character names with GI Joe ones.

Anyway.  Bison is played by Raul Julia.  Julia would alas die shortly after the film was made, but at least his last role is one where he seems to be having fun: certainly he hams it up like all his Christmases have come at once.

Mixed up in the Allied Nations vs Bison conflict are a pair of hucksters, the local crime gang they try to rip off, and a trio of journalists with a secret agenda.  This is all thrown into a big pot with a couple of gallons of lunacy and blended into a giant, delicious mess.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of people in the world:
1. those who will enjoy the incoherent, goofy, ridiculous movie as much as I did
2. sane people

You probably already know which group you're in.

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