![]() There's a pretty straightforward reason for this straightforward even beyond "Raul Julia was a real pro and would only give 100% of himself 100% of the time". ![]() He's not the top-billed star and not the ostensible box-office draw - that would be Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was at this point arguably at his peak of popularity (indeed, Timecop, which opened just three months before Street Fighter, was and remains his highest-grossing starring vehicle) - but I suspect that he gets the most screentime, and he certainly is the most electrifying, exciting screen presence in the film. The point being, if there's an argument that Street Fighter is one of the consummate so-bad-it's-good movies of its generation, that argument goes directly through Julia and lingers on him with great enthusiasm. I know that if I were an Oscar voter, I would have put him on my nomination ballot. In all honesty, I do not know if I should call it one of the best performances of 1994, or one of the worst. For another thing, the performance he gives is simply incandescent, a shamelessly hammy plunge into the most excessively florid, theatrical approach to some particularly overripe dialogue. ![]() For one thing, he's ultimately the reason the shoot was such a disaster, through no fault of his own. There is absolutely no way to discuss Street Fighter without making Julia the centerpiece of that discussion. But a whole lot of it is something else, and that something else puts in an excellent bid to be considered the single most enjoyable element of any terrible movie in the whole of the 1990s. Truth be told, a whole lot of it is an inarticulate slog that showcases its behind-the-scenes woes in clumsy action and grinding dialogue scenes. No, what I was going for was that it's difficult to avoid overstating how much of a joyfully so-bad-it's-great moviegoing experience Street Fighter is. So while it's possible to overvalue it as a film, I can't imagine anybody actually doing so. The production was a jerry-rigged disaster, and the film that sort of emerged from that production is also a jerry-rigged disaster. You know all the stories about movies like Casablanca or Jaws, where the production history is just one catastrophe after another, they didn't even know what the film they were making was going to look like, it's a miracle that the results were so sparkling and successful? Street Fighter is a perfect corrective to those stories. Okay, it's actually very easy to avoid that, since Street Fighter is a massive failure, the grotesque mutant child of a calamitous shoot. It is difficult to avoid overvaluing 1994's Street Fighter is.
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