Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter (1995, 1994)

FIGHT!

Back in the mid-nineties, there was no form of expression purer than the one on one fighting game. Pixellated violence was made truly magnifique by artful storylines of undead burning ghost ninjas tearing out spines, or sumo wrestlers knocking the snot out of Japanese schoolgirls. And, much as you had either a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, you either went for Mortal Kombat with its gory violence and digitized actors, or Street Fighter with its faster action and colorful stable of characters. Both had a deluge of versions and instalments, like the eighty six billion Turbo Duo Hyper Mega expansions for Street Fighter 2 alone, but we're not here to talk about that.

No, we're here to talk about the movie adaptations--both gloriously dumb masterworks of cinema. The early nineties had a brief slew of videogame adaptations, starting with the Super Mario Brothers movie, with Bob Hoskins in the lead. It was, erm...shall we say, akin to adapting Pride and Prejudice as a hard-boiled cop story about drug running (and where Mr. Darcy is a Mexican porn star), but it has a cult following for being so damn weird, with cyberpunk sets and mutant mushroom dinosaurs. But others were not so lucky--do you remember the Double Dragon movie? Or Wing Commander? No. No you don't. And if you do, you probably relish the quenching mercy of a bottle of JD every night.

Now these two we're nattering about today? They're definitely remembered, for different reasons. Mortal Kombat, released in 1995, was a pretty big deal, with Paul WS Anderson (definitely not to be confused with director Paul Thomas Anderson) helming things, and it definitely struck while the iron was hot during the craze around the games. 94's Street Fighter still made a profit, but is remembered as something of a flop now--so let's line up both in different categories, and natter about which one delivers either a tiger uppercut or a flawless victory!

First of all, let's talk story...such as there is. Mortal Kombat is for the most part about as close to the game as it could've been back then--it's a fairly straightforward story of martial artist Liu Kang (Robin Shou) joining wisecracking Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) and special operative Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson) to take on evil grimacing sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), by means of his eponymous martial arts tournament. It's the same setup as the arcade but expanded, and a lot of the touches of the film indeed went on to be canon to the games themselves. So far, so reasonably adapted.

Street Fighter, erm, does its own thing. Instead of being about, well, a street fighting tournament, it's a weird setup set in a conflict in the country of Shadaloo, where Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) leads an allied counteroffensive against the crimson-clad dictator M. Bison (the utterly amazing, the gloriously maniacally delightful, Raul Julia, aka Hector Gomez). For one thing, Guile isn't the main character in the games, and the closest thing to one that there is, Ryu, is relegated to a bit part most will likely forget. It isn't quite Mr. Darcy as a porn star, but it's just a notch below.

Then there's the characters. Now, any fighting game needs to sell itself on a colorful roster of combatants with distinctive backstories, looks, and personalities--so this is the critical thing to get right. Mortal Kombat does adequately--Liu Kang has a simple motive of revenge, but you're really there to see Robin Shou flex his physique and kick ass. Johnny Cage is the movie star proving himself as the real deal, and probably has the more interesting lines. The real show-stealer is Christoper Lambert as mentor and thunder god Raiden, who wise-asses his way through the whole thing, and growls out his lines in the same weird tone he put on in Highlander. Overall, passing marks, although the game was hardly a rich tapestry of characterization at this point.

"So in Highlander 2 it turns out Sean Connery's an alien? Very funny, now where's the real script?"

Now, onto Street Fighter. On the other hand, it does everything in the most bizarre, half-botched way possible...and it is glorious. Jean-Claude, having just got off such masterful pictures as Kickboxer, Death Warrant, and Universal Soldier, (and presumably, Kick Death Soldier), no doubt got center stage the same way he did in the latter film--by snorting lots of crack, and being an asshole who can also beat the snot out of anyone that said no to him. You truly will be moved to your emotional core as he delivers such lines as 'I'm gahna kick that sun of a bich Bizon's ahs so ard, the next Bizon wahnahbe is gahna feelyit!' And for some reason, Kylie Minogue is there as soldier Cammy, who pronounces the word 'can't' throughout as something very similar sounding but very different.

The game developers forced a cameo by basically everyone on their roster, so you get all these bizarre subplots shoehorned in, like Ming-Na Wen as reporter Chun Li trying to avenge her father, but screw it all. What you really want to see is Raul Julia as M. Bison--he was dying of cancer then, and let his children pick his final role. Knowing this was the end of the line for him, Julia took whatever scribbled script they had and went absolutely nuts. 

I had the same reaction to the X-rated version of Shape of Water. 

Every line is delivered like he's having an orgasm straight out of the depths of hell--I love it when his eyes bug out when threatening death to Jean-Claude. Even when rambling about what his electromagnetic powers come from, it is so goddamn gleefully wonderful to watch I almost experienced coital sensations myself. And pair him against the Muscles from Brussels mangling and slurring every syllable? The camp level soars so high it breaks the fucking stratosphere.

Then there's the action I guess. Mortal Kombat tones down the bloody violence from the games a lot, and the effects are kinda all over the place in terms of ageing. You have some cool animatronics like the monster Goro, but then there's painfully dated CG like this reptile thing imaginatively called Reptile. The sets are decently done for the time, but others look like they came straight out of a music video. It's a bit kitschy, in a nineties kind of way.

Street Fighter? Yeah, the fighting kind of sucks--with the climactic showdown between Bison and Guile, both of them just repeat the same moves like every cheap player at the arcade. So it's true to that aspect of the game, at least. But again--you're not here for that. You're here to see Raul Julia chew the scenery until the set falls down, as he puts his entire heart into declaring that he 'beheld SATAN as he feellllllll from HEAVEN, like liightnnnnninnnnnng!' You're here to see Andrew Byniarski deliver stupid funny lines that go all the way around to being genuinely funny as he reacts to crashing trucks on a TV monitor, and you're here to see Jean-Claude definitively prove that the definition of acting is far more flexible than whatever any silly Shakespearean school could teach you.

Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, Mortal Kombat definitely wins on the soundtrack side. The nineties was the golden age of techno, and I still get my nostalgic kicks from 2 Unlimited and the rest (shaddup, it's awesome!). Here? Everyone knows the ass-kicking main theme from the Immortals that gets everyone in a club roundhouse kicking into the air. Street Fighter, while having many indelibly classic themes in the game, has a more typical movie score.

Both films had continuations; Mortal Kombat had a '97 sequel called Annihilation, which was made on a budget of fifty-six cents and a packet of chewing gum, with effects outclassed by the games themselves and acting that would embarrass Shatner. Street Fighter had a spinoff cartoon and, sigh, a game adaptation. Yes, it was Street Fighter The Movie The Game. It's almost as stupid as the novelization I found of Bram Stoker's Dracula, as in the Coppola movie, based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. No, really, that exists.

Anyway--so, who wins? Well, Mortal Kombat is technically the better film I guess, with a more coherent story and tone, and some genuine moments of atmosphere. But which one I'd rather watch? Despite being nonsensical, crammed with characters, and butchering the source material, Street Fighter takes that for all the reasons I described. Every stupid line, every bizarre change, and above all, Raul Julia making the likes of Dennis Hopper look like dismal rank amateurs in the art of hammy villain acting, just makes it perfect to view with some friends and beer. Sometimes, tearing through the limits of camp badness just delivers so much more entertainment value than mere mediocrity.

So there you have it--out of these fine examples of genre-testing kino, I go with the one with sumo wrestlers and ranting Addams Family members. But really, if you want to go back to the times when Hollywood would gleefully adapt anything from the 16-bit realm with copious amounts of substance abuse in the middle, you can't go wrong with either of these. Hell, if you're not familiar with the Nintendo and Sega gems of yore, it might be even better. So put down your controllers and give 'em a watch...