Is the Street Fighter movie worth watching?

fishjie · August 7, 2012, 10:11pm

no u r wrong it was the best movie ever

BIG_BAD_MOG · August 7, 2012, 11:14pm

Ya know it IS Tuesday…so watch it so that you can totally say that when you watched it, it was merely Tuesday.

BlackAttackPro · August 8, 2012, 1:31am

[media=youtube]K0p9KVwqqvA[/media] <Nuff said. And stay away from mortal kombat too

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 4:06am

Here are my thoughts on the Mortal Kombat movie from about a year ago:

Just watched Mortal Kombat, probably for the first time since I grew pubes.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. It was awesome when I was a kid. It’s still awesome… just for very, very different reasons.

The dramatic elements are non-stop hilarity from the beginning. There is no serious moment in this entire movie that doesn’t sail beyond drama, beyond melodrama, almost beyond self-parody. It’s like a deep space probe, surveying the outer planets of bad writing, horrible characterization, cliches, and supernatural sky replacements that look like biker tattoos. The martial arts sequences, on the other hand, are acrobatic, implausibly high-flying, and, occasionally, fairly not-too-bad. The subterranean fight sequence with Scorpion (the ninja character, played by some random stuntman) is surprisingly well-choreographed with cool art direction and an intense, special effects-laden ending. That isn’t to say that it is shot or edited well, which it isn’t.

There are actors in this movie. One of them is Linden Ashby, a martial artist/actor playing a martial artist/actor, which sounds like it should be clever and the movie gleans zero mileage from it. He constantly makes wisecracks and never seems to be taking anything seriously. It is, by far, the best performance in the entire movie. Christopher Lambert, a veteran actor of action movies that seem like they were conceived in the midst of a week-long cocaine bender, shows up as the sadly wasted Rayden. He, too, contributes some knowing comedy, when he’s around.

Robin Shou plays Liu Kang, Xiaolin monk, descendant of Kung Lao, possessor of a cool set of pecs that he shows off copiously. He also did the choreography for the film. He has the thankless task of playing the single-mindedly driven central hero of the film, and he shows off some cool moves. He kind of has a tendency to yell during dramatic scenes. Sometimes, his hair looks like Eddie Van Halen’s hair did in the early '80s, which is pretty cool.

Bridgette Wilson plays Sonya Blade, some kind of special forces officer who has no apparent personality and instigates violent shootouts in crowded areas. Every male character in the movie leers at her in a way that’s so creepy, even I get weirded out, and I’m neither a girl nor in the universe of this movie. There is a particularly lethargic fight scene in the movie in which she kills her enemy, Kano, by breaking his neck with her legs. The scene would be a waste without this moment, which is played with 007-esque silliness.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of techno music. Fear Factory has a song in the scene with Scorpion. I think Cary-Yuki Togawa could play a good Klingon, if they need one for the next Star Trek movie. Who the fuck knows? I don’t know.

Just for giggles, here are my recollections of MK: Annihilation from around the same time:

BadMojo · August 8, 2012, 4:10am

Johnny Cage punches Goro in the groin. That’s enough for me to give Mortal Kombat a :tup:

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 4:11am

Exsqueeze me? Please enlighten me: how do you even begin to support an allegation like this?

As long as I’m on a roll digging up old stuff, here’s what I wrote about SF: The Movie.

I’m well aware of the reputation of this film. When Hollywood first started to look to video games as a source of material, they quickly earned an implicit assumption of badness. Street Fighter is seen as one of the earliest exemplars of that.

But as I rewatched it for the first time in quite a while, I found myself wondering: Is it really that bad? I found much to enjoy about Street Fighter–and I mean genuinely enjoy, not as a “so bad, it’s good” B-movie or as an ironic amusement.

Let’s talk about what that means for a second. In order for a movie to be “so bad, it’s good”, there are some requirements it has to meet. It can only be enjoyed with respect to how poorly it’s made, how ineffectual it is in achieving its goals, and how badly everything backfires on the filmmakers. Having never really questioned it before in the context of this movie, I must now take issue with this description.

You laugh at a “so bad, it’s good” movie. You don’t laugh with it. While I often found myself laughing, I found that it was because the movie wanted me to laugh. The material was clearly intended to be taken humorously. There is a crucial difference between Street Fighter and a legitimately “so bad, it’s good” movie: this film has a great deal of intentional humor that actually works. Furthermore, for the most part, it avoids pretensions of seriousness.

Much of this film is played with a giddy, amped-up sense of comic timing, like in a screwball comedy. Many details are gags, such as the Capcom USA arcade control scheme on Bison’s hovering console, or the “Good morning, Vietnam!” radio DJ. (Incidentally voiced by the real life “Good morning, Vietnam!” radio DJ.) The evidence indicates that this is essentially an action-comedy, with all the broad acting, the one-liners, the theatricality of driving a tank through the wall of a crowded arena, and so forth.

Another thing that surprised me was the competence of the storytelling. While perhaps not masterpiece caliber, Street Fighter has plenty going for it. It is an ensemble film that actually manages to function as such–no small feat, especially in light of the X-Men movies. I believe the reason this particular feature of the film works is the structure of the plot. Most movies have a main vein that snakes throughout the entire story, with smaller vessels branching off.

(Therein lies the trouble with X-Men: How do you contrive a story in which multiple characters fit into a single vein? Answer: You can’t, not without one of them assuming much more importance than the rest, no matter how much the movie tries to pretend otherwise.)

Street Fighter is more of a series of small, adjacent rivers, which occasionally merge with one another before they all finally join as one–the delta being the climactic final battle at Bison’s lair. Every character or group of characters gets a bit of self-contained story-stuff in the film’s first half. One of these self-contained bits might bump into another, and then another, which creates the system of causal linkage that eventually brings it all together. It’s handled a fair bit better than it seems to get credit for.

Consider also the pacing. With so much business to settle, so many characters, and a running time barely in excess of an hour and a half, Street Fighter should have been a far bigger mess than it ends up being. Instead, it turns out to be a fairly lean, brisk film. Events don’t follow one another, so much as relentlessly tumble into one another. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a similar inexorable, bullet-from-a-gun sense of rhythm, though it is admittedly far better than Street Fighter in most other respects. Most conventional action films tend to be most arresting during their first and last half-hours, with the middle portion dragging and delaying the final resolution. Street Fighter avoids this mid-section sag.

In part due to this sense of momentum, Street Fighter cruises through transitional plot points and artificial obstacles more adroitly than many other, better-respected action movies do. Die Hard, for example, has the clumsy and obvious plot device of the ticking timebomb, which might as well have a sign on in that says “Act II is over. Act III begins now.” Street Fighter doesn’t lay its machinations so carelessly bare, though, interestingly, it does include a ticking clock device–at the beginning. Perhaps the filmmakers intentionally sent up this hokey tension-inducing technique by deliberately putting it at the “wrong” spot in the film.

I was also impressed, albeit less so, by the shooting and cutting. The film is at its best when it’s being funny. The comedic sequences are well-handled, making use of cinema’s capacity for visual jokes, such as the scary guns that turn out to be loaded with tennis balls. The hand-to-hand combat scenes were more of a mixed bag. While the shots are composed with reasonable clarity, the cutting is quite fast–perhaps too fast. I found myself wishing that the shots would linger just a little bit longer, to achieve just a little more impact. Some of the visceral feel of the fighting was lost due to the hummingbird tempo.

I was also somewhat disappointed by the construction of the final battle between Bison and Guile, but I cannot fault the filmmakers for this. Given the poor condition of Raul Julia’s health, it is understandable that they had to avoid clearly showing his movements. Still, in this day and age, it’s almost refreshing to see this kind of obfuscatory filmmaking done as a necessity, rather than as a choice. And Julia more than makes up for his action shortcomings by playing his other scenes with rabid glee. In the film’s endgame, when Bison reveals his belief that he is a god, Julia is downright volcanic.

Van Damme is much more subdued, but that is a necessary evil. His task in the film is to play the straight role, to be the archetypal meat-headed military hero who is unaware of how hilarious his story is. This, I believe, is preferable to a different performance in which he might try to match his costar Julia ham-to-ham. Van Damme does what he has to do and allows himself to be involved in the humor by association. He’s not generally known as a strong actor, but here, he makes the wise choice.

(A couple Van Damme-related observations I couldn’t help but make: 1. He is the only actor in the movie I noticed who comes close to the proper pronunciation of “Ryu”. 2. He sounds kind of like Tommy Wiseau without all the weird cadences and inappropriate snickering.)

If there was any part of Street Fighter that struck me as legitimately deserving of its poor reputation, it was the subplot with Blanka and Dhalsim. Unlike the rest of the film, this portion was absolutely a self-important, ineffectual failure. It seems to attempt a sort of profound philosophical statement about our equal capacity for good and evil, of the close relationship between man and beast, but the whole thing is thoroughly silly. It’s handled like a bad monster movie. Plus, these scenes have an atmosphere of creepy Nazi experimentation that is far too heavy for this material to support. It is completely wrong for this movie.

Guile, at the very least, succeeds as a soft parody of the thick-headed action hero. Blanka has no place here, and without Blanka, there is no purpose whatever for the bland, empty Dhalsim character.

That raises the question, though: If the only really awful material is localized in such a minor, tossaway subplot, how can that kind of awfulness come to dominate Street Fighter’s reputation? Why do people lavish undue fondness upon (for example) Batman (1989),, yet remember Street Fighter as an unsalvageable failure? I can venture a few guesses.

Action films in the 1980s existed in a certain climate, which perhaps would have been far more tolerant to Street Fighter than the climate of the early 1990s. Street Fighter was just too far on the wrong side of the fashions of movie history. Van Damme and the action tropes associated with him had become passe. And, as I said at the beginning of this piece, there is an implicit assumption that video game movies are bad. When we approach something with the expectation that it will fail, we will see it for its failures and not for its successes. It sucks and it’s wrong, but it’s true. Street Fighter, more so than most movies, is guilty unless proven innocent.

Zero · August 8, 2012, 4:31am

No, not really…

As far as fight scenes go, they were all pretty mediocre. They all mostly consist of multiple one-shot attacks edited together to create the illusion that there was a complete fight.

Kang vs Reptile:

Director: OK, Reptile, run into the room and kick Liu Kang in the chest with one foot and the face with the other. And, action!

(Reptile runs into the room and kicks Liu Kang in the with one foot and the face with the other. )

Director: Great, cut!

(Actors move to their new positions)

Director: Everyone in position? Great! Now Liu Kang, do a quaduple horizonal flip in the air and land “violently” onto the ground. And, action!

(Liu Kang does a quaduple horizonal flip in the air and lands “violently” onto the ground.)

Director: Great, cut!

(Actors move to their new positions)

Director: Everyone in position? Good! Now Liu Kang, get up from the ground and block a kick from an advancing Reptile. And, Action!

(Liu Kang gets up from the ground and blocks a kick from an advancing Reptile)

Director: Great, cut!

(Actors move to their new positions)

Director: Everyone in position? Good! Now Liu Kang, throw a roundhouse kick. Reptile, you duck it and throw the same kick as before, which you will block Liu Kang. And, Action!

(Liu Kang throws a roundhouse kick. Reptile ducks it and throws the same kick as before, which Liu Kang blocks).

Director: Great, cut!

It’s a common editing trick, I know, but when you look at how much action they are doing with each take, it’s not very impressive. Not that Street Fighter was any better, mind you.

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 4:45am

I’m not sure about that. I think I remember Robin Shou saying in an interview that he was pushed to do longer takes than he was used to.

Nevertheless, your observation is very astute. The fight sequences are filmed and constructed in a gormless, one-damn-thing-at-a-time, flatly nonresonant way. It’s like a fight scene would be filmed for a soap opera.

pherai · August 8, 2012, 5:02am

super agree that “so bad its good” doesn’t aptly describe SFTM. willfully not taking itself seriously =/= so bad its good

4Play · August 8, 2012, 5:59am

YESH YESH YESH

Thanks for asking.

http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/psx/a/sfm-9.jpg

evilweevle · August 8, 2012, 6:03am

watch the movie… AND THEN PLAY THE GAME!!!

[media=youtube]t4UdQVYkCZg[/media]

True_Grave · August 8, 2012, 6:10am

^^ Wow this post fails hard, considering what you described is like EVERY movie fight ever made.

No filmed fight is one single, seamless take. Its all a large series of takes getting it juuuust right…and then finally editing it all together in one complete package.

^^ Critic also liked Spider-man 3 and tried to justify his opinion by saying that he thought the other two were ALSO really stupid. Ummm yeah he’s no film authority lol.

Taito · August 8, 2012, 6:22am

SFTM owes it’s longevity to taking the Clue? approach to game adaptations instead of the Battleship approach, and has aged a lot better than a movie based on a video game with a joke of a storyline deserves to.

MK was good. LOL Internet picking on crowd-pleasing popcorn entertainment.

King9999 · August 8, 2012, 6:26am

Go watch that one scene in The Protector.

On topic: Yes, watch the movie. After that, I recommend watching the SF2 animated movie. Street Fighter V is worth watching too, though I wonder what everyone else thought of that series.

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 6:45am

Movies aren’t miraculously absolved of standards or protected from criticism just because they’re in the action genre.

It’s so okay that it’s average.

No kidding. But part of the art of editing is crafting the illusion of a continuous flow. There is an entire grammar to cutting together shot sequences that enables this to happen, just like the grammar that determines whether or not a series of words become a sentence.

When each action feels isolated in its own little one-dimensional bubble–which I think is what Zero is contending–then the editing has fallen down on the job.

True_Grave · August 8, 2012, 7:15am

I disagree. The fights were edited and put together quite well, and “flowed” as smooth as most fights on film. But you can Nitpick if you like.

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 7:21am

There’s that word again. It’s like the go-to response anytime somebody criticizes something that somebody else likes.

“You know what? Hitler wasn’t so bad.”

“I don’t know, man. He did try to take over the world and exterminate anybody who wasn’t a part of his master race.”

“You’re just nitpicking.”

Noble_Cactus · August 8, 2012, 7:23am

Nah man

[media=youtube]uKAtUeWCfrE[/media]

90’s gold. And by gold I mean polished turd, but still gold.

goodm0urning · August 8, 2012, 8:11am

As long as we’re on the subject of differentiating good action from bad, here’s a fairly vicious takedown of Michael Bay’s The Island by Matt Zoller Seitz.

An excerpt:

The Island is the kind of nine-figure
monstrosity that invites critics to take turns bashing it like a piñata. To quote Slant magazine’s Keith
Uhlich, “I think we’re far enough along in our civilization that the following
can be stated with absolute authority: all Michael Bay movies are evil.”

But rather than keep swinging until the candy falls out, let’s instead
study the piñata’s construction and try to discern why Bay’s work is so insubstantial and
yet so menacing. Shorn of every type of connective material (intellectual, geographical, moral,
rhythmic), his films sprint from peak to peak (or as hack action writers might put it, from whammy
to whammy), herald both big and small moments with hysterical fanfare, and treat plot points not
as a springboard to introspection, parable or poetry, but as chronological signposts that mean
exactly what the script says they mean and nothing more. Bay’s movies render emotional and intellectual
participation unnecessary. They aren’t cinema, but the opposite of cinema.

Cinema doesn’t feel and think so you don’t have to. It invites you to think
and feel for yourself—not by inundating the viewer with exposition and connect-the-dots
psychoanalysis (qualities canonized in Batman Begins) but by presenting images and situations
that are playful and exact, yet open to interpretation, or at least engagement. Cinema means more
than it says or shows; it has a life beyond what’s contained in each frame; its fundamental and deliberate
incompleteness is an endless provocation to reflect, interpret and dream. Why, exactly, did Travis
Bickle kill all those people? What, exactly, happened to Dave Bowman at the end of 2001?
We don’t know, exactly, and we’ll never know. The films’ images provoke questions and associations
while discouraging reductive answers. That’s why we can’t stop thinking and talking and writing
about these movies.

The Island doesn’t invite reflection, or even in-the-moment
free association. With its action-figure characterizations, frenzied glitz, galumphing score,
Schwarzenegger kiss-off lines and incidental homophobia and sexism (I counted at least two effeminate-menacing
characters, and poor Johannson is made to play a scene validating the idea that women can’t be trusted
with credit cards), it’s actively hostile to thought itself.

Taito · August 8, 2012, 9:01am

And in this thread we’re protecting SFTM’s numerous flaws as a movie with SFTM’s intentional and unintentional humor. I can say “meh” and “overrated” at SFTM all day, when the late 80s and early 90s, weary of the ‘serious’ era of roided action heroes, made a rash of self-aware action-comedies more entertaining than SFTM. But I have a sense of humor and don’t have a bug up my ass.

And it doesn’t really matter to me how well or poorly MK’s aged. I’m sure that adapting a game into a tentpole movie is “meh” 20 years after the fact, but it was still an important evolutionary step (relative to Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, SFTM) that today’s blockbusters benefit from.