It’s high time for Street Fighter’s redemption arc.
The 1994 adaptation of Capcom’s fighting game series, led by Jean Claude Van Damme himself, has become a bit of a cult hit, but still holds the broader reputation of being an all-time stinker. In some ways, that reputation is deserved — the famously troubled production led to some catastrophic performances, fight sequences, and a generally overstuffed script trying to accomplish too much at once.
But also, Street Fighter rules. Some things about the movie genuinely work – the costume and set design, and Raul Julia’s inspired performance as the villainous M. Bison, in particular – but it’s the unique alchemy of how that mix with what doesn’t that makes Street Fighter a special experience.
The movie follows All-American soldier Colonel Guile (played by All-Belgian movie star Jean Claude Van Damme, a request made by Capcom) and his ragtag group of Allied Nations fighters as they try to take down General M. Bison, the dictator of Shadaloo City who has plans to take over the world (and “make “every Bison dollar […] worth 5 British pounds. That is the exchange rate the Bank of England will set once I’ve kidnapped their queen.”). Aesthetically and narratively, director Steven E. de Souza steers the film more in line with Vietnam War-era action movies of the 1980s (the real-life disc jockey who inspired Good Morning, Vietnam has a cameo in the movie) than tournament-based movies like Mortal Kombat or Bloodsport.
I watched the movie for the first time this May, and fell for it immediately. Julia’s divine, Shakespearean villainous performance results in one of the most memorable and quotable Hollywood villains of its era, and rightly so. (It was his final role, and one he took for his children, who loved the game.) Even the elements that don’t work are crucial to the final product: Van Damme is plainly disinterested in having anything to do with the movie, and his well-documented cocaine habit on set was a distraction, to say the least. The action sequences don’t resemble those of the Street Fighter games in any meaningful ways, and last-minute schedule changes meant there wasn’t adequate time to rehearse.
Street Fighter also did quite well at the box office, making almost three times its reported production cost and continuing to make Capcom a decent chunk of change to this day. But it was quickly rejected in the broader cultural sphere as another failed Hollywood video game adaptation. I’m not alone in my love for the movie – there is a small, but dedicated community of Street Fighter diehards. Perhaps none are as vocal as cinematographer, director, and host of the “How Would Lubitsch Do It?” podcast Devan Scott. For Polygon’s Spicy Takes Week, I talked to Scott about this ludicrous, ridiculous, wonderful movie, anti-masterpieces, finding value in “trash” art, Paul Verhoeven, The Rise of Skywalker, The Room, and much more.
The question at the heart of the talk was: What is a “good” movie, anyway, and does that even matter?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Polygon: When did your journey with Street Fighter start for you?
Devan Scott: [I saw it for the first time] in the late 2000s, or in the early 2010s, [with] one of my best friends, Willia. And immediately, we knew it was something special. The film has a strange momentum, this wacky chain of events. The film never lets up. And even the elements about it that don’t work contribute to its momentum. So immediately we watch [and go] “Wow.” It became kind of a fixture in our lives after that. We watched it probably three or four more times over the years. We quote it constantly.
We became a little bit infamous on a very old — pre-social media — gaming forum. They had a movie subforum. And they would do monthly film polls, and we almost got tossed out of the ’90s poll because you’re not allowed to discuss your ballot before you send it and we each independently put Street Fighter as number one. No one else voted for Street Fighter at all. And we both wrote pretty long essays to try and justify why we thought the movie was actually a major work of ’90s cinema.
So it sounds like it clicked for you on first viewing.
It definitely took some rewatches to understand the dynamics of what made it so interesting. I think on the first rewatch you know, it’s this Oh my god, every line is thudding in the most gorgeous way. And secondly, the main character is a weirdly perfect parody of American imperialism. Subsequent watches deepened it. There are so many little beats that we didn’t pick up on [initially], but I think the bones of what we love about it [were] very clear on day one.
Did you come to it with any affinity or experience with the Street Fighter franchise?
I have never played a Street Fighter game. I don’t know anything about them other than what I’ve gleaned from reading articles about the movie, and how it has nothing to do with it, which is great.
Why on earth did you watch the movie in the first place? Most people at the time hated it. So it wouldn’t have come in with a glowing reputation.
One of the bedrocks of our friendship is that we love bad movies. We’ve tried to scaffold theory around it by calling [them] “anti-masterpieces” when they really work. But we just love bad movies. It was truly Plan Nine from Outer Space that got me into them. Katharine Coldiron coined it “trash cinema,” which is a phrase I like. Films that, in hindsight, I realized I love because they tell the story of their own making. They tell the story of how they fell apart, like that wonderful Polygon article, where you see the story of how the film was falling apart while watching it. Nothing you read in the article is a surprise. It’s just confirming your priors, because the film does such a great job of telling the story of its own dissolution. So I think that’s been a long standing love of mine, is just a deep enthusiasm for films that fail.
Obviously, a lot of people didn’t like the Street Fighter movie when it came out.
With good reason!
Why do you think it was so widely reviled?
It fails at the thing it tries to do. It’s not a good version of what it wants to be.
I would say a big reason is that I don’t think it has a functional plot and characters. I don’t think Colonel Guile is a worthy protagonist. I think the vast majority of the performances don’t work. Kylie Minogue cannot act. The guy who plays Ken [Damian Chapa] is truly without a hint of charisma. And the movie cannot decide who its protagonist is, because obviously the studio wanted as many Street Fighter characters in it as possible. So it cannot settle on a plot. That’s part of why Raul Julia has the platform to do good, because at least the movie settles on a villain.
I also think it’s a flatly ugly film on a cinematographic level, and it’s clear when watching the movie they didn’t have coverage for certain beats, so the editing is often baldly atrocious. They clearly didn’t have time to finish. For example, there’s characters who just show up on screen looking entirely different at the 11th hour, and there’s no explanation other than they really have to shoehorn in the Street Fighter look, right? The film is so patently broken on so many levels, and it also throws into relief the stuff that does work. Is it more patently broken than an actual hit, like Transformers 2? I don’t know. But it’s obviously, palpably, a mess on most levels. I say that as someone who has bought the movie twice.
I think what Van Damme has got going on in that movie, or what he doesn’t have going on, contributes a lot to that. He’s clearly not interested in being a part of the movie at all, and was famously difficult to work with on the set. I think it strangely then helps the movie be the thing that it is, and if he was more committed in his performance, I don’t think it would be as special.
There’s a friend of mine, an experimental filmmaker, Bram Ruiter, and we were talking about the movie Bad Lieutenant, the Herzog one. He watched it and said, “This movie is broken.” But clearly Werner Herzog understands that some movies should be broken. That’s a fully intentional film. That film is exactly what it wants to be. It is a travesty of its own script. Herzog knew what he was doing. And he made a broken movie. And I love that movie for it. Nicolas Cage is maybe my favorite living American actor and that’s my favorite performance of his.
So I think Street Fighter is a great example of that. Imagine the good version of this movie. I don’t mean that good, but like the version it wants to be. A competent PG-13 movie that depicts a weirdly pseudo-Vietnam War-style take on the Street Fighter subject. So let’s say it’s a good version of that with none of the other things. I think it wouldn’t be half as remarkable, right? It would just be yet another blockbuster, but because it’s broken, we’re talking about it now.
You’ve called Street Fighter “the greatest accidental Verhoeven movie,” and I would love to hear a little bit more just directly from you about that reading.
Specifically I’m referring to the project Verhoeven was up to in especially the mid-to-late ’90s, with Basic Instinct, but especially Starship Troopers and Showgirls. I think they’re like sister films to each other, because they both operate on the same principle, which is that you’re watching a film that does not overtly tip its hand to the fact that it is deliberately a satire that’s undercutting its own dramatics. Starship Troopers is a film that on its face is — and I mistook it for this when I was a kid — a bad dumb action movie that played into the tropes. But it’s a piece of literal fascist propaganda that Verhoeven has constructed to pass as an American blockbuster, with the hope of those of us who were in on the joke seeing the parallels between the two. He’s essentially equating American blockbusters circa the mid-1990s with fascist propaganda circa 1935. There’s explicit references to Triumph of the Will and the works of Leni Riefenstahl in that film. So that film is a deliberate travesty on its own subject matter.
And Showgirls is similar, right? What Starship Troopers is to the Robert Heinlein book and fascist propaganda and American action cinema, Showgirls is to ’90s sex movies… and All About Eve, weirdly. And so with Street Fighter, essentially, let’s operate not on the logic that the filmmakers are on, but on what it is, which is a travesty on a slightly Rambo-esque story of a gung ho, all-American man, a blockbuster about him taking down this tin pot dictator. And the film that we got operates on the same principles as Verhoeven, where it doesn’t tip its hand to the fact that it is satirizing this even though it is – it just doesn’t know it. Although in some ways, it kind of knows it. It’s just that in the times that it kind of pokes fun at itself, it is weirdly less successful than the times that it doesn’t intend to.
So if Verhoeven films are thoughtful satires fronting as the things they’re satirizing, then Street Fighter is the thing it’s satirizing that accidentally stumbled into being a thoughtful satire. Because I think it truly is. There’s so many moments in the film where I’m like, Good god, this is the Bush Jr. Era. This is the Iraq War. This is “We want to take this guy down, leave international law behind, let’s go get him and then we’ll win and have a little jump freeze frame at the end.” You can pretty much put “mission accomplished” over that final title card. It would apply.
The reputations of Starship Troopers and Showgirls have been somewhat mended over time. What do you think it would take for Street Fighter to get there?
I don’t know if we can get there. I’ve tried. Lord, I’ve tried. But I tend to think that cult rediscoveries of these films tend to happen within a decade or two at most. Ed Wood was rediscovered within a decade of his death. I saw The Room in 2006, and I’m just a rando in Vancouver. And so that’s only three years for it to kind of seed, and then it kind of exploded and you got the James Franco nonsense. So I think that it’s almost too dated now. And I would hope that Street Fighter will get re-discovered. I think it might take that online groundswell and just some major people with clout going, “Hey, this is accidentally great satire.” But I don’t think it’ll get a Speed Racer-like rediscovery, for example, because Speed Racer is a good movie.
It feels like a central part of the anti-masterpiece theory is that it showcases the collision between the artistic and commercial concerns in film.
Oh, yeah. And that’s why The Rise of Skywalker is, I think, an incredible film, because it’s not the story of Luke Skywalker, or Rey, or Kylo, or whatever. It’s not the story of them. It’s the story of a bunch of idiot Disney executives trying to course correct for a movie that received backlash, and trying to please two irreconcilable groups of toxic fans at once. That’s why it’s amazing. All these films become character studies of their own creators, and in a weird way, if The Room is an obvious example of a film that’s a character study of Mr. Tommy Wiseau, Street Fighter is obviously a character study of what America thinks of itself circa the ‘90s.
I see the connection between the movies, but to me, one difference is that I think there’s quite a bit about the Street Fighter movie that actually works: Raul Julia’s performance, the production design, the costuming, and some of the jokes even landing. Rise of Skywalker less so for me.
I happen to think Rise of Skywalker, on a purely visual level, is pretty darn good. Everyone involved in that movie shat the bed in many ways, and that’s been litigated well. The movie is very visually striking to me. It’s a perfectly composed picture of a pile of smelly dog shit. It’s still a picture of dogshit but… it’s well composed.
Is it crucial to an anti-masterpiece that some parts of it actually work?
I don’t know actually, because I’m trying to think of the worst one of those. Like Foodfight!. Nothing in that movie works and that’s one of my most dearly-held movies. This gets back to one of my probably more radical theories. I didn’t come up with this theory, but it’s one I subscribe to: All movies are documentaries. A narrative film is a documentary of its own making, as a baseline. It can be more than that.
So for example, as a piece of narrative cinema, Foodfight! is not functional in any single way at all. I can’t think of a single thing about that movie that I think is better than disastrous, cataclysmic, and yet, I dearly love that movie, because it so effectively tells the story of a megalomaniacal egomaniac guy who just really desperately wanted to do Toy Story, but make it even more commercial. And again, failing in every step of the way. The fact that they lost that film’s files shows up on screen and it’s hilarious. The fact that the film trots out explicit Nazi symbolism in a children’s movie… that is as shocking as any John Carpenter scare I can think of. It boils your blood and I love that. It makes me feel angry. So yeah, I don’t think a movie has to have any good elements to be a worthy movie.
What do you think these movies can teach us about how we watch movies?
That’s an interesting one. I think the default way that we’re trained to watch movies, we’re expected to take the film on the terms it sets out. And then if the film works, we accept it on the terms it sets out. Or if the film doesn’t work, we reject it on the terms it sets out. And that’s treated as a binary between good and bad movies, essentially. And it’s kind of a contract between you and the film, right?
It’s not just unilateral, the film setting out terms. [Michael Haneke’s] Funny Games succeeds wildly on the terms it sets out, but I would not expect more than a couple thousand people worldwide to actually like it. I say this as someone who really respects that movie. What I think my kind of few decades-long love of bad movies has taught me is that it’s just as valuable, and I think even, to me, more valuable, to approach movies in a more open-minded way. In a way that approaches them as objects to be studied. And that can be just as interesting.
If a movie doesn’t succeed on its own terms, what else is it doing? How else can we get into the movie? To go back to The Room, it’s an accidental documentary character study of Tommy Wiseau. And so there’s literally limitless reasons that art movies, even mainstream narrative cinema, can be interesting. Watching bad movies, I think, opened me up to not just other bad movies, but to re-examining all of cinema from that lens.
There’s a new Street Fighter movie in the works. I know it’s not gonna be what you want out of a Street Fighter movie, but do you have a wish list?
The idea of interest in franchises is still to this day very alien to me. For example, the three Lord of the Rings films Peter Jackson made were some of the most formative film experiences of my life, like [for] many people of my generation. I probably saw Return of the King in theaters four times. And I was like 13. It was a big, big deal for me. I was totally obsessed as a teenager. And yet I could not care less about The Rings of Power. I watched one Hobbit film and then checked out on the other two just because I found it completely uninteresting.
Same thing with Star Wars, where I think part of why I love Rise of Skywalker is that even though I think Star Wars 1977 and Empire Strikes Back are two of the great masterpieces in pop cinema, I truly have zero attachment to that franchise. I couldn’t care less if a film was good or bad. I just found Rise of Skywalker incredible. That doesn’t mean I reject it. I think Andor is actually great. A couple friends of mine successfully lobbied me to watch Andor, which I did under duress. And I thought it was terrific. But point being I would say that I truly can’t think of anything to say about the idea of a new Street Fighter, because to me, it’s no more or less interesting than any random film. So if you had said like, they’re gonna make a Mortal Kombat movie, or like, a Battletoads movie? I would just say, good, knock ‘em out. If someone convinces me to watch it, I’ll see it.
Any final statement on your defense of Street Fighter?
I think that the heart of the anti-masterpiece “theory” is that, the idea of a film being good or bad, and that being a determinant of its worth, is a secondary variable. That worth is determined by much more than that. And to me, that’s the heart of what I love about cinema. It’s why I have a hard time actually picking favorites. I have films that I think are admirable films, that move me personally, films that I think are great in many ways, but I truly have a hard time – as much as I love ranking, I truly struggle with it. Because I don’t think my favorite movies are good or bad, or even better than other movies that aren’t my favorite. They just have a place for me in my heart of movies. And I really advocate for people divorcing themselves from the idea that good means good.
Street Fighter is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon and Apple TV.
The post The world’s biggest Street Fighter movie fan explains why it’s an accidental masterpiece appeared first on Polygon.
