Game On: Street Fighter(Dir Steven E. de Souza, 1h42m, 1994)

Much like the summer blockbuster, the video game (and by extension, the video game adaption) is no stranger to the classically trained actor playing alien warlord, supervillain, criminal mastermind, and beyond. Members of the RSC have appeared in franchises as far apart as Fallout, the tough-as-nails Dark Souls franchise, and the history-hopping Assassin's Creed. In some cases, the classically trained actor appearing in a videogame movie is on their way to a pay check and little more: we have already met Dennis Hopper on this journey, and he joins Ray Liotta in Uwe Boll's cinematic catastrophe (beginning with its ludicrously long title), In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, Oscar-winning Ben Kingsley in Boll's somehow even worse adaption of tits-swords-and-fangs vampire game Bloodrayne, and basically the entire cast of 2017's Assassin's Creed (reviewed here...)

There are some performances, though, where that old Christopher Lee quote "Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them" has been taken fully to heart. Of all people, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is surprisingly good in the downright awful Doom (2005), Bill Nighy is at least enjoyably hammy in Detective Pikachu, Malcolm McDowall's brief but laconic take as Death in the animated Castlevania series is the best thing about the series, and of course, Jim Carey steals the show in all three Sonic the Hedgehog movies. The final boss of these is Raul Julia's turn as the villainous dictator, M.Bison in Street Fighter, a performance that elevates its entire film through its pure embracing of what a videogame villain can be in the hands of a good actor.

Not for Power, Not for Evil...But for Good: M Bison (Raul Julia) and Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) square off

Street Fighter itself is a far more competent film; directed by Steven E. de Souza, responsible for penning the better half of all the 1980s and early 90s action movies you've heard of (Commando, Die Hard and Die Hard 2, The Running Man), it's both a more grounded take on the material, and a more faithful one. To a point. Street Fighter loosely adapts 1991's Street Fighter II, a game that rubs shoulders with the greatest games of all time, such that this is one of two adaptions released in 1994, the other being anime Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, whose 1995 dub by the nascent Manga Entertainment would feature one Bryan Cranston as part of its dub cast. Street Fighter II's plot is rather simple: warriors from around the world, displaying various martial arts, from boxer Balrog (Grand L. Bush), to sumo E Honda (Peter Tuiasosopo) gather for a tournament, unaware of the shadowy plans of M.Bison, a warlord and would-be dictator. 

Its cinematic adaption sticks to this, but embellishes it, largely unnecessarily; our protagonist is no longer Ryu (Byron Mann), the game series' iconic fireball throwing humble martial artist, but Jean-Claude Van Damme's soldier, Guile - admittedly a choice Capcom, the game's creators, had long been fond of. This in itself refocuses the film from mere martial arts tournament, akin to Enter the Dragon, to mishmash of war movie, spy thriller, and, according to de Souza, Star Wars. Thus, we get what beleaguers so many videogame movies: an overencumberance of plots, characters, and little details for fans to point out to casual movie goers and a cottage industry of YouTubers to pore over adnauseum; this obsquenence to the fanbase brings us such detail-strewn, plot-light escapades as Warcraft, Paul W.S. Anderson's Mortal Kombat, and the clunky but wildly popular Five Nights at Freddie's and Minecraft movies, the latter two bolstered by teenage audiences. . 

In Street Fighter's defence, the focus on Guile and M.Bison does drive the film forward, whilst Chun Li (Ming-Na Wen)'s arc of revenge against the dictator does give us some of the most quotable lines of the film, but juggling another twelve characters, and their respective plotlines does leave the film unfocused, and much of the film's cast are either lesser-known actors or regulars on Australian TV including the wince-inducing attempts by Kyle Minogue to pass herself off as British lieutenant to Guile, Cammy - the film was largely shot on the country's Gold Coast. Van Damme doesn't make for particularly good company either: when he's not fighting - which is often - he simply doesn't have the charisma to carry the film, and even a dramatic scene involving his demise (hurrah!) is undone mere moments later by a half-hearted reveal that he is in fact, alive. Without Julia, this is a mediocre film.

Too many players: the overly cluttered cast of Street Fighter throw a pose

For Raul Julia owns this movie; he not only steals almost every single scene he's in, as his consummately dramatic performance as the warlord and would-be dictator, complete with his own questionable ideology, cultured tone, and presence - his first scenes sees him brutally but effectively deal with the soldiers captured alongside the hostages he uses as bargaining chip, but even this series of neck-cracks and swift dispatches adds to his fearsome reputation, and to his cultured warrior persona. Julia's Bison is not simply a imposing tough, though, but a cultured one. It is here, monologuing like the best cinematic villains over his plan to place the world under the yoke of the "Pax Bisonica", in a sequence in which the generalissimo looms over a model of his Speer-esque city - later inevitably destroyed in a fight scene - that Bison is at his best, announcing he has created violent supersoldiers "Not for power, not for evil, but for good!"

All of this builds to a showdown with Chun Li, where words, rather than combat, are the focus, and where Julia's version of Bison announces, matter-of-factly, that he can't remember the focus of her revenge, the death of her father at his forces' hands, simply stating "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday". There is something of the classic Bond villain, most notably Donald Pleasence's Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967), but taken to a Shakespearean extreme, a campy but ultimately believable villain ranged against a film that never quite manages to find him an unstoppable force of a rival to duel against. That Julia was dying of cancer whilst making the film, agreeing to the role for his son who was a fan of the game, only further underlines what he brought to the role. Videogame cinema is still waiting for another actor to so utterly steal a movie as he did.

Street Fighter is emblematic of a film industry getting to grips in how to turn this new medium into cinematic fare; a lot of it simply does not work, from the leaden Van Damme outwards to the uneven tone of the film to trying to fit the plots of thirteen characters into an hour forty movie. Yet, for a couple of scenes, Street Fighter is more than just a semi-bearable action flick, and in Raul Julia's sinister and magnetic M Bison, gives videogame movies their first truly cinematic moments

Rating: Neutral

Street Fighter is available to buy on DVD and BluRay from ‎88 Films and is available to stream in the UK from Apple TV

 Next week, to a globetrotting adventure searching for unimaginable power - and a good video game movie - in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider