Street Fighter: La Última Batalla

This movie suffers from the same problem as most video game or comic book adaptations in the '90s. The people making it just don't take the source material seriously so the whole thing comes across as one big garish cartoon with no attempt at characterizations or an intelligent plot. It's supposedly for teenagers and adults but it's intellectually on a level only pre-teen children can enjoy. There is some entertainment here, but only in that disreputable "so bad it's good" guilty pleasure way. Most of the actors ham it up, particularly a slumming Raul Julia in his last film. Jean-Claude Van Damme is about what you expect, only with ridiculous dyed blonde hair. I did enjoy Ming-Na Wen as Chun-Li but the rest are lame. This is also the disappointing film directorial debut of Steven E. de Souza, who had written the screenplays of some of the '80s best actioners. He also wrote this mess but unfortunately it's missing much of the wit that Die Hard, Commando, or Running Man had.

Street Fighter is a strange video game movie. The game is an amazing 2D fighter with a wide array of characters from different continents who battle it out for...something.

The Movie, surprisingly, has more plot than you would think. M. Bison (Raul Julia, in his final performance) is now portrayed as a megalomanical super villain who has dreams of causing collapse to the entire world, such as killing a large number of hostages unless paid a ransom worthy of Dr. Evil standards, creating a breed of super soldiers and kidnapping the Queen of England and create his own world based off of his image. Trust me, it is as silly as it sounds.

Lt. Guile (Jean Claude Van Damme) approaches the situation in that he has to save the hostages and hopefully put Bison on ice, once and for all, thus stopping his plans for world domination.

From there on in, the movie is basically an almost two hour fan service with various subplots with almost all the characters from the Street Fighter universe. Zangief and Dee Jay work for M. Bison as Muscle and Computer Technician, respectively. Chun-Li, Balrog and E. Honda are all out for get revenge and Ken and Ryu are professional fighters hoping to score a battle against the vain Vega and evil Sagat.

Like I said, the rest of the movie is nothing short of fan service, since all the actors deliver some truly awful one liners aside, Van Damme's Guile almost sounds like Tommy Wiseau ("The Room") when you close your eyes, and the whole plot itself is actually quite boring.

Well, why in the world would someone defend this movie then? I'll give you three reasons, two are part of the movie, and one is a personal thing.

1. Raul Julia's M. Bison. A villain who looks rather powerful should be given a great performance. While Raul Julia did die after this movie was over, there is no denying that he went out with a bang rather than whimper. His performance is laughably over the top, but at no point do you look at his face and see a man who seems to think he's in a movie, and as a result, he makes the movie quite amazing. If anything, he gives us a theatrical villain which, for his character, works very well.

2. There was a lot of room for potential here. Let's be honest, writing a movie is easy, but writing a good movie is hard. The director (Who is also the writer) took a fighting video game and crafted a movie out of it, and a fairly well done one at that. Sure, not in execution, but in originality, it works.

3. It was a movie from my childhood. I was a child of the 90's, and as such, I can remember my parents letting me watch this at a very young age, and it was awesome. Damn the Nostalgia factor, but it's what makes this movie really good. I can remember how intimidated I was in the final battle scenes, and how cool M. Bison was to me (in that over the top Saturday Morning Cartoon style of cool).

This movie is a very easy one to attack for just not being good, but understand from my point of view, even knowing how bad it is, having no character development, some truly cheesy one liners and awful performances, including Van Damme giving a performance that makes him sound like Tommy Wiseau if he smoked cigarettes for ten years and you closed your eyes real tight, I still like it.

It's cheesy, terrible and ridiculous, but all you need to know is that Raul Julia delivers some of the best lines for years to come, and you know you are dealing with a kind of cult classic when one of the film's greatest lines is, "This is merely superconductor electromagnetism. Surely, you've heard of it." In other words, go see this movie if you haven't already.

7/10.

I can't believe all the negative comments I've been reading here about this movie. Really, people, what were you expecting from a Van Damme movie? Citizen Kane? Yes it's silly, Van Damme's acting is atrocious and Raul Julia looks very ill (and is miscast) in his last theatrical film. Still, the movie is not overly violent (hence the PG-13 rating), the script and the actors never take things seriously for one moment, everybody (except for Julia and Van Damme) give out good performances and some of the jokes are actually pretty funny. Also there's a STRONG gay subtext between the Asian and American "friends". Maybe I'm seeing something that's not there, but the looks those two exchange at times... It's loud, it's VERY fast-paced...it's a HUGE amount of fun! It's not classic cinema...heck, it's not even good cinema, just fun! Turn off your brain and enjoy!

STREET FIGHTER (1994)

This movie has aged surprisingly well. It's always been bad but now it's so bad that it's kind of amazing. Based on the kick ass video game the makers do a crappy job of trying to string together a plausible storyline. But it does manage to have some over the top action sequences and some truly cringeworthy moments like Ming Na Wen delivering her best Chun Li speech before fly kicking a charismatic Raul Julia as Bison. Van Damme is also pretty hot and fun as "super american" Guile. The movie is overly fun and best of all there's never a dull moment.

Budget: $35m Box Office: $99m

7.5/10

I have always been a huge fan of the Street Fighter series in video games. So when this movie came out I was really excited, of course I was way too young to appreciate a movie, but I can tell that back then I thought it was horrible.

A few years ago it was aired on TV and (I don't why) I saw it again. And I found it kind of funny. The story is all twisted if it gets compared with the video games story; I mean, in the video game, Ryu is the most important character and in the movie it is hardly seen. Cammy is a creation of Bison (in the video game), so she is part of the bad guys, while in the movie she is friend of Guile. A lot of intentional mistakes were made in order to transform what could be a good story into a useless-action-movie.

I hoped to see hadoukens and spinning kicks when I first saw the movie, but there is nothing of that. In other words, the movie sucks.

PS: Kylie Minogue, who played Cammy in the movie, declared later that she was completely sorry of shooting such a bad movie.