1994 Called To Say It Does Not Want ‘Street Fighter’ Back

“Video games can never be art,” the late film critic Roger Ebert often said. To say he eventually regretted such a blunt statement may not be accurate, but he certainly grew weary of defending it, as he wrote in a 2012 column. Quoting from Aristotle, Seneca, and Cicero, Ebert took a high-minded approach to develop a defense of his thesis before cutting to the point.“One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game,” Ebert wrote. “It has rules, points, objectives and an outcome.” With that distinction, he hit upon the crucial fault line in adapting video games into films — should the moviemakers attempt to mimic the gaming experience and risk a one-dimensional narrative, or wrap the game around a well-worn storytelling or screenwriting trope?The 1994 adaptation of “Street Fighter,” — which is actually an adaptation of the video game “Street Fighter II” — starring Jean-Claude Van Damme took the latter route. It’s “Street Fighter” without the street — less boss fight and more Bond movie, with Mr. Van Damme as sort of a Belgian 007 mixed with G.I. Joe.It turned out to be a disaster, both in front of and behind the screen. Rather than showcasing one-on-one combat between different opponents, “Street Fighter” crafts its story around a hostage crisis in a fictional Far East nation, with Mr. Van Damme’s Colonel William Guile clashing with minions loyal to General M. Bison (Raul Juliá). Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue in ‘Street Fighter.’ Wikimedia CommonsThe movie, written and directed by Steven E. Souza, who co-wrote “Die Hard” and “48 Hrs.,” fails both as a video game adaptation and as a film. It certainly isn’t art — though the bar is low — and offers a truly dystopian near-future where the United Nations’ army is a global superpower.With a cookie-cutter plot copied from countless other Man on a Mission films, “Street Fighter” manages to be preposterous and not zany enough. It takes itself too seriously, building up narrative dead ends like the super soldier and the mad scientist who crafts him, showcasing plot points that mean little and generic action that goes nowhere. A scene in which General Bison checks his bank account in between waxing philosophical had me laughing out loud though — do we really need to chew up screen time on this?Worse, Mr. Van Damme doesn’t get to seriously kick behind until an hour into the film, where he and actress Kylie Minogue’s stunt double get in martial arts mayhem as they approach Bison’s lair. That’s in contrast to reports, confirmed years later by Mr. Van Damme himself, that he and Ms. Minogue were very much involved in off-screen physicality with each other while shooting the film. In 2016, Mr. Van Damme, who was married at the time, said it would be “abnormal” not to fall for the Australian pop star’s beauty.Ms. Minogue, who was primarily known as an actress when she booked her “Street Fighter” role, makes so little impression as Lt. Cammy White, I had to look up her character’s name to write this review. A Katherine Hepburn performance this is not, as she tries to make the most of her small stature by running around and doing a lot of yelling. It’s little surprise that Ms. Minogue has focused more on music, and her Hollywood film career post-“Street Fighter” has been mostly limited to cameo appearances.The real tragedy of “Street Fighter” is etched in the sunken eyes of Raul Juliá, a titan of acting who was slumming for a payday and the education of his children – both perfectly worthwhile causes, but who would be dead from stomach cancer two months before the movie’s opening weekend. Juliá, who could deliver Shakespeare soliloquies with aplomb, struts around in full megalomaniac mode, howling his lines and devouring every available piece of scenery. His sallow eyes and bulky costume are the only evidence of the very serious health challenges that he soldiered through like the acting professional he was.The cast of ‘Street Fighter.’ InstagramHis scene in which he dresses down to a smoking jacket, then dons a Bison-appropriate red military cap complete with silver emblems to complete his “after 6 p.m.” look, is a highlight of the film. It’s a moment when the movie stops beating the audience over the head and decides to wink at it instead.It’s too bad that tone wasn’t more readily adopted by the rest of the movie. In between hostage crises, steel lairs collapsing in on themselves and explosions that look like they flattened a UNESCO world heritage site, “Street Fighter” was perhaps responsible for modern video game adaptations dropping the pretense and delivering an experience that feels like playing a game rather than watching a film.And it appears that tactic is taken by the new “Street Fighter” adaptation, out later this week and starring Jason Momoa, where the cage match is front and center.The passage of time, audience tastes, and current events can crisscross one on top of the other, intersecting until the true origin becomes unclear. Are audiences’ expectations of a video game film different today because more people are playing video games than did in 1994, or did the failure of films like the original “Street Fighter” make Hollywood handle the genre differently? Did world events like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks sober the filmgoing public so that a goofy action popcorn flick goes down differently?What is clear is that, in 1994, Hollywood knew it had a small but devoted band of gamers whose tastes needed to be sacrificed to appeal to a wide audience. Today, it’s the reverse. In 30 years, culture has regressed to the point where Hollywood studios would be hiding from gamers armed with smartphones and Rotten Tomatoes usernames if an adaptation of a video game were less than truly faithful.It’s a shame that those early stabs at video game adaptations — like this film and 1993’s notorious box office bomb “Super Mario Bros.” — couldn’t rise on their own terms and instead collapsed under the groaning weight of modern fandom.Middle-of-the-road is not always bad. Aiming for a wide audience can take guts in today’s factionalized pop culture environment where everyone has their own niche entertainment.Films have taken on some of the qualities of video games in the years since 1994, while video games have become more cinematic. The video game’s narrative pathway of escalating challenges, capped off by a major brawl with the Big Bad Guy, is the pattern for dozens of films, not least the expansive Marvel universe. In our modern entertainment, it can feel like we live in a video game world.As “Street Fighter” showed, back in the mid-1990s art fought video games. And the winner was not art.

1994 Called To Say It Does Not Want ‘Street Fighter’ Back

1994 Called To Say It Does Not Want ‘Street Fighter’ Back

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