“The temple above us was the wonder of the ancient world. Bisonopolis shall be the wonder of my world. But I think the food court should be larger. All the big franchises will want in.”
So says villainous dictator M. Bison while describing the imminent construction of his garish mega city in 1994’s notorious Street Fighter. Two decades later, America saw a cartoonish buffoon and wannabe despot serve McDonalds as deeply silly political stunt on the campaign trail. Writer/Director Steven De Souza obviously couldn’t predict that; he was, after all, adapting a silly video game beat ‘em up, but as we sit in 2024, Street Fighter feels like a hilariously prescient warning of how stupid things were going to become. Oh, and it’s a damn good movie too.
Funded almost entirely by Capcom and written in one night (if you believe De Souza), Street Fighter was yet another attempt by Hollywood to ride the wave of video gaming’s exploding popularity. Sandwiched between Super Mario Brothers and Mortal Kombat, the three are held up as the key examples of why adapting video games is a fool’s errand. While Mortal Kombat has slowly been reassessed as a joy of a film and faithful to the games, and some will go to bat hard for Mario Brothers, Street Fighter often feels forgotten. Its lasting legacy exists as memes or GIFS of Raúl Juliá’s M. Bison shouting, “Of course!” or “For me, it was a Tuesday!” In fact, Juliá is cited by many as the only person involved in on the film’s wavelength. True enough, in one of his final performances, Juliá demolishes scenery, clearly relishing hamming it up in a role he only took because of his children. To stop with him is to discount a film bursting at the seams with ideas and personality.
Watching Street Fighter now is like devouring twenty pounds of candy and coasting on a sugar high for days. Immediately, you’re struck by the plasticine sheen and vibrant costumes. You gaze at Jean-Claude Van Damne’s glistening muscles and hideous blonde dye job. Pop star Kylie Minogue totes a bazooka bigger than she is. The silliness is jarring at first but almost immediately gives way to something else: yearning. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot that this shit is supposed to be fun. Crippled by every studio’s desire to chase the shared universe dragon, we’re stuck in an endless loop of self-important lore that sets up ten more movies, all with ho-hum grayscale visuals. It’s not enough to see wacky freaks of nature on screen; it has to be deathly serious, too. There’s an air of fear around acknowledging the goofiness of source material in modern genre adaptations, be it comics, video games, or otherwise. Street Fighter suffers none of this. Make no mistake; this isn’t just exhaustion with current film trends speaking; it’s impossible to overstate how earnestness on display feels like a salve.
Plot, if it matters at all, is thin. Something about Allied Nations soldiers (a UN stand-in) being kidnapped by evil General M. Bison, who has designs on taking over the fictitious southeast Asian country Shandaloo, demands $20 billion in return to help fund his Bisonopolis venture. Mixed in amongst the chaos are con artists Ryu and Ken, reporter Chun-Li, and a veritable who’s who of fan favorites from the games. All inevitably coalesce at Bison’s secret base, and come on, you know the rest. Frankly, it’s a mess, but through sheer force of will, Street Fighter transcends something as antiquated as narrative structure. From almost every standpoint, the film makes the wrong choices. Casting famed Belgian JCVD as All-American Guile, hiring Benny “the Jet '' Uriqudez to choreograph the fights and then barely focusing on them (the fights are terrific when they deign to show us), training the cast on their stunts the night before they were to film them, it’s a recipe for disaster. It is a disaster, but it’s one that, despite misunderstanding the game itself, captures the full-on excitement and explosion of color that video games provide. Sets dripping with color fill the frame, each another level for you to explore. It’s an aural and optical adventure like you’ve been shunted into a 16-bit land full of possibility.
The refreshing sincerity mixed with De Souza’s dependably dry cynicism creates a miasma that hasn’t really been replicated since. M. Bison is a shockingly modern creation. Obsessed with his brand and reformatting the news to fit his image, his goal isn’t just to take over the world; it’s to turn it into a goddamn shopping mall. He’s a strongman without depth, the kind of guy to paste his face on dollar bills, and his mecca is in the shape of a literal skull. Like most men with eyes at capitalistic takeover, there’s no “there” there. He’s silly as hell with his red cape flowing behind him, a fool’s idea of “cool.” He’s a troll with an army of devoted morons ready to take a bullet. Morons like Zangief (a pre-Leatherface Andrew Byrniarski) aren’t being paid to do it and hadn’t even thought that was a possibility. In some ways, with his legion of fans ready to defend him on Twitter at the drop of a hat, M. Bison feels like the tacky logical conclusion of someone like Elon Musk.
De Souza is taking stock of the fallout of consumerism excess of the 80s, throwing his hands up and using Street Fighter as a means of working through it. There’s a creative rot to a video game company hiring you to adapt their product as quickly as possible. Bison’s childish pursuits feel like an extension of that. It’s a stretch to be sure, and the film’s commentary isn’t particularly salient, but something’s here, something sinister. If all goes well, Bison and his army will have an entire country where the only currency is made up of dollar bills with his face on them. His goals are hilariously infantile, but is the idea of “owning” your own money as some brand IP extension all that different from NFTs? Or whatever crypto-nonsense we’re onto this month? There's nothing like the coke-fueled daydreams of Street Fighter to leave you up at night with galaxy-brained thread connecting.
Street Fighter’s magic is that its cynicism is reserved only for whatever half-baked commentary it’s wrestling with. When it comes to the source material, it’s got a candy-coated heart, and that’s what cements it as a modern balm. Unlike blockbusters now, where acts of fantasy are undercut by “yeah, it’s silly, we know” one-liners, every joke here is with the movie, not at it. Zangief is a big oaf, but that’s what makes his realization of being used and babyface turn so sweet. When beautiful people in eye-popping costumes are playing this so earnestly, the proclivity to buy in is just so easy. JCVD, eyes glazed over in a cocaine haze, delivers the silliest “rah-rah” speech you’ll ever hear, but in another example of how easily we overlook his talent, he knows this and still plays it with stone-cold seriousness. As Guile screams into the camera, swearing vengeance against Bison, it’s enough to want to leap off the couch and join the Allied Nations yourself.
Earnestness in the face of stupidity is a quality that will matter more as our world steeps itself in meaningless culture wars. Our digital world is designed to fill your head with hate. This is exemplified most by Carlos Blanka, one of the kidnapped AN soldiers and Guile’s best friend. Bison is creating an army of ubermen, and Blanka is a prime candidate. Pumped with chemicals and a steady visual diet of history’s atrocities, he’s meant to be an angry, violent killer. A funny thing happens, though, and one of Bison’s scientists, Dhalsim, secretly begins slipping visual acts of kindness and morality into Blanka’s mind. What’s birthed is a monster with a heart of gold, one without the influence of constant streams of hate. As we fill ourselves with a daily intake of bile, becoming irony-poisoned feels like the only logical end. A film like Street Fighter, in all its ridiculous glory, is a left-field reminder that as moronic as it all becomes and the dumbest people on earth continue their ascent, sincerity matters. Good people jumping in the air and high-fiving in a freeze frame must count for something. What that is, who’s to say, but sometimes it just feels good to embrace it.
-Brandon Streussnig
Love this!
This is great and much appreciated