Street Fighter

Sometimes you see a movie and you think to yourself, wow that was a terrible movie and then you rewatch it years later and realize that it wasn't that bad and then sometimes you realize that it was worse, Street Fighter definately fits into the latter category. This movie was so much worse than I remember I could not get through it fast enough. There is no wonder that movie really did mark the beginning of the end of Van Damme's block buster career.

To be frank I am grateful that this little project of reviewing Van Damme’s movies does not extend to the entirety of the movies themselves and is simply about the martial arts performance of Van Damme. I am further grateful that outside of the final action sequence Van Damme is not involved in too many of the actions scenes. Therefore I can get this over with.

The thing to keep in mind about this movie is that it is based on a video game so many of the actors in the film were cast to mimic the video game characters. Just a brief word on the casting, Steven Brooksbank if the casting director, I looked it up on IMDB and I am pleased to report he has not been part of anything of note, though he still manages to find work. I don't think there is a single more poorly casted movie made. Van Damme is cast to the play the lead character, Colonel William Guile who is supposed to be a Colonel in the United States Army, in this movie Guile is the ranking officer of the Allied Nations peace keeping force and chief rival the psychotic megalomaniac Bison. Brooksbank actually casted the late Raul Julia, yeah it is as ridiculous as it sounds, to play the role of Van Damme's nemesis. Bsion is supposed to like 6'6" 230+lbs, instead of minurature Raul Julia. And it goes on and on, I mean really this casting in this movie was just awgul. So basically the story is this; Bison is out for world domination and Guile’s mission is to stop him, nothing about this movie was good.

Guile and Bison don’t meet until the end of the movie and the fight is choreographed to mimic many of the moves from the video game. In addition to the elaborate jumps kicks that are typical of a Van Damme movie, he also uses a jumping bicycle backflip kick. Deciding to go with an actor instead of a fighter for the role of Bison handicapped the final fight sequence as it has in previous Van Damme films, i.e. Death Warrant. Instead of Guile and Bison capping off the movie in big fight sequence we were left with a bunch of far shots of some stunt double filling in for Julia to punch Van Damme and then some close ups of Julai choking Van Damme. The fight is capped off with Raul Julia being pulled all over the screen on wires in an attempt to simulate flight. Basically the only thing redeemable about the final fight is that Van Damme utilized his world famous jumping roundhouse kick, other than that this movie was absolutely worthless.