He's a bad guy who gets the chance to do something good, and he does it with the cool enthusiasm of a bad guy. One of the later offerings in the Van Damme library that shows he can still be a classic action hero. Some of JCVD's more recent work has a profound dramatic touch, and this is one of the more notable examples. This film could be a continuation of Wake of Death, as its also about the exploits of an enforcer for a seedy organization, but the tone and setting of this more recent movie are completely different.
This is a bona fide film noir, filmed in French and set in Europe, with some actions sequences thrown in that only Lukas could pull off even though he's older than most of his colleagues. Initially, his job is legit if not messy, but one night things go wrong in the club, and he agrees to become a mole for the cops to dodge a murder charge and keep his daughter from getting swept away by child services.
Lukas stays tough while protecting his kid, and there's nothing more bad-ass than that. A character has to be hardcore to rock this mullet. This is the story of an already hardened vigilante getting mixed up in something really big, and with the police force on strike, he takes on a world of criminals with no backup.
It's cult classic because of some crazy action sequences and unbelievable antics on the part of Chance. If you read a short story while you were in high school called The Most Dangerous Game then you already know the basic premise and its chilling implications. With John Woo's first American directorial debut and Van Damme at the peak of his career, this character rates high on the bad-ass scale. Timecop has a place in the general canon of how time travel works along with other films like The Terminator and Back to the Future.
Max Walker is a cop who not only has the chance to catch a criminal but reverse time and prevent his wife's murder. He gets to seek revenge and erase the tragedy in the first place, which is like having your cake and eating it for any action hero. Walker is good at what he does in the first place, and when the fight becomes personal he takes it up another notch. The movie is famous for some of Walker's hilariously brutal quips, like the Broadway joke while he's repeatedly kicking someone, and the steamy intimate scenes, one of which opens the movie.
JCVD's movies have inspired numerous sequels and spin-offs, and the Universal Soldier films are among the most successful. Capcom didn't want a martial arts movie, and the resulting film almost completely eschews the street fighting elements of the game.
The movie borrows sparingly from Street Fighter mythology - incorporating Guile and Chun-Li's vendettas against Bison into their motivations - but elsewhere shoe-horns popular characters into superficial supporting roles.
Balrog and Honda become Chun-Li's camera crew, T-Hawk and Cammy are Guile's army lieutenants, and Ryu and Ken - two of the game's most iconic heroes - are unrecognisable as a pair of wisecracking con men. Perhaps worst of all is Blanka, who is merged with the game character Charlie Guile's murdered best pal and re-written as the unwilling subject of Bison's super-soldier experiment.
He is green at least, but that particular aspect of Blanka's character does not translate well to a mid-budget live action film. As the film progresses, all of the characters gradually shed their movie disguises, and by the end they're all brawling around in their familiar costumes and performing their signature moves, culminating in a hilarious group pose at the end.
It's a late consolation for fans wanting to see their heroes brought to life, but it descends the movie into high camp, and there's not a fireball to be seen. How well did they cast the video game characters? Casting Street Fighter 's iconic roster was always going to be a tough task, and the results are hit and miss at best. Indeed, some of the casting makes you wonder if they had ever seen the original characters - T-Hawk, Ken and Dee Jay especially.
As for the leads, in different circumstances Raul Julia could have been a fantastic Bison, but at the time he was battling the cancer that would sadly take his life within the year. He looks the part and hams it up admirably, but his lack of physicality is painfully obvious in a number of scenes. Production was able to move along, but it ingrained the mistake in the mind of North American gamers for years to come.
There is only one main character in the movie which had no previous basis in the Street Fighter franchise: Captain Sawada. Acting as the third in command behind Guile and Cammy, Sawada was created out of necessity by de Souza.
To appease Capcom, he created Captain Sawada as a way to get their pick in the movie while being able to keep Mann as Ryu. As for Sawada the actor, it seems like de Souza was right: all of his lines, except for one spoken in his native Japanese, had to be overdubbed in post-production because they were incomprehensible. The actor had been cast as M. Bison because of his dramatic background, with the hope that his performance would bring some dignity to an otherwise silly action movie.
The only problem was that Julia had to get surgery right before filming started, and the production was not made aware of his condition. When he arrived on set, he had lost a lot of weight, and his level of energy was low to say the least. Julia had to get surgery right before filming started. The filming schedule was thus changed to allow Julia more time to recuperate and hopefully gain some weight.
While he was able to get better, his condition still had to be concealed on screen with the judicious use of wide shots and lots of make-up. This was a problem because a movie with such a heavy use of stunt work would usually necessitate several weeks of preparation to make sure that no one gets hurt and everything goes smoothly.
Instead, the stunt coordinator had to come up with choreography on the same day scenes were being shot and the crew were given little time to prepare the sets. Actors did not have time to be trained properly and some of them picked up martial arts even sword fighting with the help of some extras. Considering that the fights are some of the best parts of the movie, it all turned out surprisingly OK. For the first one, Van Damme has admitted that he had a big substance problem at the time.
In fact, the production hired a handler whose entire job was to keep Van Damme under control. There are two main reasons why Thailand was chosen as the main site for the filming of Street Fighter. The first one is that the government of Thailand offered monetary incentives in order to attract the production. The second one is that the country promised access to breathtaking natural locations.
The natural sets were everything promised, but the exotic location plagued the cast and crew with unexpected issues. Many actors fell ill because of the local food, which caused them to lose tremendous amounts of weight in a short time. One actor also developed skin problems from coming in contact with the dirty water of the Chao Phraya river. The temperature also caused innumerable cases of heat exhaustion. But of all the problems encountered in Thailand, there is a particular one which could not have been foreseen….
Eventually, their addiction got so bad that some unnamed actors would push the audacity to the point of getting massages several times a day. Needless to say, the production ended up giving a solid kick to the local economy. Filming in Thailand was supposed to culminate with the all-out assault on M. Even the interior shots were beset with troubles.
With scenes being shot in a bewildering sequence or cut entirely, cast members struggled to make sense of their roles. I thought: What sort of science am I supposed to be doing and what am I mad about? I just stopped thinking — they just told me what to do and I followed instructions. The Australian actor Robert Mammone was employed to play spec-ops soldier Carlos Blanka, who is captured by Bison and transformed into the green-skinned Blanka we know from the games.
He only discovered that a body double was to play the post-transformation scenes when he met him at a cast party before shooting. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, the actors did what they could to cope, hanging out in Bangkok bars at night and the gym during the day. Ming-Na Wen, who played Chun-Li, and underwent intense weight training in the lead up to the film, remembers it a little differently.
I remember one day, I punched him so hard he cried. We were just goofing around! In a cast full of young newcomers and civilised character actors, Jean-Claude Van Damme stood out as the archetypal movie star, with an ego to match. As he later admitted, he also came into Street Fighter with a major cocaine habit. Heygate has similar memories. Then he came out with a bottle of a champagne.
I told him it was against health and safety to have alcohol on set. From that point on, he hated me. The rest of the actors recall a frustrating and bemusing experience. Mammone managed to strike up a better relationship with him. But for some reason, perhaps because we played best mates in the movie, he was fine with me.
We went to dinner, we hung out, he gave me my first proper Cuban cigar. Van Damme has also since confessed to having an affair with co-star Minogue during the filming.
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