STREET FIGHTER: THE MOVIE

dMYD DVD

Starring Raul Julia

Trailer

M

Street Fighter, the game, is chess with added explosions, gallons of acrobatics and a man with a perfectly-balanced intestinal tract. Since nothing on this plane of reality can live up to the incredibility of that near-perfect piece of pop-art, the movie was always destined to be flip-flopping bag of failure. But wait: There’s JCVD, the American colonel with a secret Belgian ancestry, there’s two-men playing Ryu and Ken in what seems to be a Lethal Weapon sequel written by dead stoats and look, Kylie Minogue, bizarrely taking everything dead seriously in her first steps towards a film career strangled at birth. Now cower: there, towering above the entire sad-debacle of a failure stands Raul Julia, resplendent in evil-train-driver garb, mangling the very idea of the video-game movie with a performance for the ages. Honestly. Julia is one of those hideously underrated actors who barely gets a mention today on account of his, well, untimely death. A justified hero in his native Puerto-Rico, the man was a maestro of overblown, expressionistic acting, treating movies like pantomimes running on amphetamines and generally blowing anyone else out of the movie like a Dambuster. After his first flush of Hollywood success as Gomez ‘Acquitted’ Addams, he took on the preposterous role of General M. Bison to please his kids, big fans of the game. What a guy. He preens, he pouts, he exhales the virtues of genetically engineered super soldiers, and he has pictures of himself astride a horse. He’s a whirling maelstrom of camp brilliance, and he did it all whilst he was dying. The film itself is a churning nightmare of terribleness: Julia single-handedly rescues it from hell by being basically the best thing ever. Respeck.