Eye Candy #193 - "Street Fighter" (The Damme #7)

Street Fighter:  Movies based on video games, almost without exception, are lousy.  ”Resident Evil”, “Super Mario Brothers”, “Doom”, they all show how weak some of the back-stories of the games really area (which makes sense - the point of the game is the action, not the plot).  “Street Fighter” was The Damme’s shot at this particular niche, and as much as it pains me to say this, captures the tone of the “Street Fighter II” video game fairly well - the colors are loud, the violence over-the-top with little to no blood-letting, and the “overarching” story (which it barely had) was meant to be invested in too seriously.  The Damme (with red hair because apparently he couldn’t manage blond) is Col. William Guile of the Allied Nations.  He is opposed to M. Bison (Raul Julia in his last role), a dictator who rules the country of Shadaloo by force of arms.  After Bison captures a group of AN aid workers including Guile's best friend, Guile has 3 days to either pay a ransom or rescue them.  Enter the rest of the characters from the game, no matter how painfully some of them are shoe-horned in (particularly Blanka, whose execution is laughably bad).  We’ve got the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, much as the video game does.  There are a couple of other “names” in the cast including Wes Studi, riding his post-”Last of the Mohicans” wave, Australian popstar Kylie Minogue, Ming-Na Wen, and a host of C-D level actors.  The best of the bunch?  Character actor Andrew Bryniarski, who seems to be the only one of the bunch not taking himself too seriously in his role as Russian dimwit Zangief.  Raul Julia actually does a passable job trying to give some gravitas to the moustache-twisting of M. Bison, but he can elevate the whole picture and cast on his own.  So that’s all to say, it’s a passable adaptation of its namesake video game…but still TERRIBLE.  But, for a Damme movie, it’s better than “Knock Off”. Woodchuck sez, “The 90’s completely deserved a movie this bad.”