Street Fighter

Bizarre, surreal, and ultimately less engaging than playing Pong with a blind man, Street Fighter is the second in an ongoing cavalcade of action/adventure films based on video games (the first, you surely remember, was Super Mario Brothers, with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper). That the industry has turned to kidvids for inspiration bodes ill for intelligent moviegoers everywhere (and can the cinematic exploration of the aforementioned Pong be far behind? I see William Shatner as the “paddle,” don't you?), but Street Fighter gamely tries its best to bring the mayhem-crammed game to the screen intact. Julia is General Bison, a scenery-chewing demagogue who's taken a group of U.N. troops (although here the U.N. is called the “Allied Nations”), along with several dozen relief workers, hostage in the war-torn country of Shadaloo. The tyrannical Bison, intent on world domination through eugenics (and really, aren't they all?) demands $20 billion for the release of the hostages, but soon runs afoul of scrappy U.N. maverick Colonel William Guile (Van Damme), a tough career soldier with a heart of gold and the proverbial fists of steel. Together with comrade-at-arms Cammy (Australian pop sensation Kylie Minogue) and a pair of nice-guy street hustlers (Chapa, Mann), they take on the evil dictator and more or less save the world. Raul Julia deserved better than this for his last role, but he goes after the cheesy part with gusto, all Marty Feldman eyeballs and exposed incisors. Van Damme, on the other hand, is unusually reserved, showing up in less than a third of the scenes and staying relatively mute for most of those. Talented international stars like Roshan Seth (A Passage to India) and Kenya Sawada (Rakuyo) comprise minor background characters to no discernible effect. It's hard to give a damn one way or the other about Street Fighter -- it's so thin that an errant sneeze might topple this glossy house of cards. Many, many kudos, though, to the art director who somehow managed to sneak past the censors a John Wayne Gacy-inspired portrait of the General in his living quarters! At least someone affiliated with this production had their sense of humor on the right track.