In my previous two posts, which you can read here and here, we started ranking movies based on tournament fighter games. Today in this final post we look at the big two – Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, which are also the two biggest fighting game franchises of all time.
So here we go:
#2 Street Fighter (1994)
Fans of the Street Fighter, and really Street Fighter 2, video game franchise would have been all excited to see the characters come to the big screen. But while the costumes were game accurate and the personalities pretty close the action and most of the special moves were left out. Overall the fighting was a whole lot of meh.
Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile could not do an American accent to save his life but at least he got to do a lot of kicking. And we also have singer/actress Kylie Minogue as hot Cammy and Ming-Na Wen as Chun-Li; you can currently see Wen on ‘Marvel: Agents of Shield’ where she has only gotten more beautiful with age like a female Benjamin Button. But I digress.
Besides the cheese factor and camp of it all what makes this movie worth watching is Raul Julia’s (Addams Family flicks) over the top performance as the villainous tyrant M. Bison. He was clearly having fun with the role and gives it his all. Sadly it was his last performance before he died.
Funny tidbit – they made an arcade game based on the movie. So that’s a video game based on a movie based on a video game. Right.
#1 Mortal Kombat (1995)
The only video game movie to actually get it right. It has great action, humour, mediocre special effects and is just a lot of fun. The characters have personality, the plot is silly but straight forward and the theme song will get you pumped up every time you hear it. The film benefits from having a small roster of seven characters to deal with.
This movie really felt like the video game come to life. Robin Shou is cool as Lui Kang and Linden Ashby is hilarious as Johnny Cage, but the stand outs are Christopher Lambert as thunder god Raiden and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the menacing sorcerer Shang Tsung.
Mortal Kombat is the ultimate guilty pleasure but is fun for fans of cheesy martial arts films and the uber successful and long running video game franchise.
So what did you think of the list? What’s your favorite movie based on a tournament fighter? Feel free to comment below.
For Round One of this list you can click here and for Round Two you can click here. And for more perfect movie posts with the occasional fatality you can follow me on Twitter @suprememango012 for updates. Julien is outie like a navel. l8rs.