M. Bison and the Art of Ham | Street Fighter 1994 | A Video Essay
/ cinecringemovies
#badmovies #streetfighter #90smovies
Welcome to CineCringe where we watch the best of the worst and the worst of the worst but never anything good -- today is a video essay on one of the all-time movie villains, Raul Julia's M. Bison.
For first time movie reactions of great films, check out CineBinge at / cinebingereact
MUSIC:
"Apero Hour" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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"Backbay Lounge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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"Bossa Antigua" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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"Covert Affair" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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Raul Julia took the role while 3 years into battling stomach cancer and was extremely ill at the time, & he did it because his 2 sons were huge Street Fighter fans...
The man loved nothing more than knowing his work entertained kids. So he spent much of his final time on Earth to working on this role in a horrible movie, knowing it would bring his kids some joy, and was determined to have fun with it. What an absolute legend.
"For you, the day M.Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday." .....fucking brilliant
I was hoping PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN would've used that quote when he beat TRUMP in 2020 & again in 2024
@@andrewblanchard2398 I mean, he is your power hungry dictator who stole the election...so it fits. If Chun Li had a small daughter and Bison sniffed her like a pervert, it would really fit
@@andrewblanchard2398 lmfao you look like someone who's never had their dick sucked and it shows
When I saw the title, I thought you were disrespecting his brilliance in this film. Im glad I watched this. Thank you for HONORING RAUL JULIA.. R.I.P.
RIP, Raul Julia, 1940-1994.
Raul Julia was a god damn treasure..
That line has stuck with me also, it's delivery and context really drives home his megalomania and indifference to everyone else in the world. True villainy.
Raul absolutely killed it in this role. It's so over the top yet totally believable at the same time and to think he was dealing with stomach cancer while filming it and you appreciate it all the more.
It’s a shame that this was Julia’s final performance. Perhaps that’s why he went full ham - he probably knew the end was near and the critics be damned. One other full ham villain you could have cited was Sir Ben Kingsley as The Hood in the live action remake of Gerry Anderson’s “Thunderbirds”. Some tasty, joyful ham to be had there.
Street Fighter the movie is a perfect example of the how "entertaining" and "good" don't necessarily overlap. Is it a good movie? No way. Is it a wildly entertaining campy mess? Absolutely yes.
I am strongly reminded of the FMV cutscenes from the Command & Conquer video game series featuring Tim Curry as a truly demented Russian general. So bleeping cheesy! Cheese, glorious cheese! A masterclass in ramping up the hamming it up and layering on the cheese so hard it becomes absolutely fascinating. You can't not be utterly engrossed. You can't look away or space out. Truly over the top. Bonkers on toast. Early C&C games were tough as nails. Even if you did everything right and set your base up well, you still lost the battle 50% of the time by sheer force of numbers. They did not mess around. So it felt super awesome when you won.
the shot of Gary Oldman as Zorg in the Fifth Element while you talk about "ham"-iness is so on point ! As would be one from Gary Oldman in Leon, actually. And watching this, I realize a bunch of my favorite character and/or actors went ham at least once in a part and nailed it in the best way possible. Like Alan Rickman and Raul Julia
Palpatine comes to mind as a great villain. No matter if prequels or OT- dude LOVES being evil and seeing others suffer. The whole return of the jedi finale is him setting up a spectacle for Luke to see, since he just hates jedi so much he wants the last of them to suffer greatly. In the novelization he also mocks yoda by mimicking his speech pattern when asking Luke about Yoda, which is crystal clear awesome. He's the strongest part of the prequels too, being calm, calculated, reasonable until the whole facade drops, "I am the senate" and here he goes spinning like a bayblade killing jedi and having the time of his life, finally relaxing after holding the mask for so long. He makes dark side fun, he makes me wanna join
It's so sad that Steven De Souza was blamed for the failure of this movie. Capcom representatives wanted to add SO many of the characters from the game in that it became difficult for him to write enough dialogue, AND tell the story. Plus, Van Damme spent so much time dicking about in his trailer and refusing to come out so they had to film the scenes without him in which left little time to get the other actors ready.
Kylie Minogue is Australian. I haven't seen this movie in a long time, but maybe her character is supposed to be English. Raul Julia was a great actor. He put as much effort into his acting in bad movies as he did in good movies. Another example is "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", a movie made by a PBS station in Canada.
Okay, but can we talk about how amazing Raul would have been as a Joker?
He would've been an even better Penguin.
I wouldn't mind seeing him as Hugo Strange.
Riddler comes to mind..
The man became Bison I've played many street fighter games and i always feel Raul did it better 😂
Please do "Spawn". Jesus, I think I now realize how a great actor like John Leguizamo can fall between the cracks (see Super Mario Bros).
Simply brilliant. Thank you so very much for this.
4:39 Bison has deserved self pride while the Baron does not. Bison can take self pride in knowing that he took over made himself into the ruler of a small country through his physical abilities, engineering skills, tactics, strategies, wits and charisma. Disregarding ethics and morals that's an impressive accomplishment. Also Bison can take pride in the fact he is the rich boss of a multi-national company he created out of almost nothing. Granted it's a drug syndicate but still it's a very successful snd profitable globe spanning company. Also Bison can take a perverse sense of pride in the fact that he succeeded in building both his drug syndicate and dictatorship constantly facing off against both national governments AND all the other more well established multi-national criminal organisations. Also he literally worked with engineers to successfully create a super suit that basically lets him become a flying super fast healing super human, a feat that it seems nobody else in that world had ever done before. Also if the ANA decided to give him the 2,000,000,000 ransom and his super soldier experiments bore fruit he had a real chance of successfuly conquering and taking over another neighboring country or two even if he never had a real shot at taking over the world. The Baron by contrast has absolutely none of that. The Baron simply inherited his wealth, status, power, subjects, lands, spaceships, armies and advanced machines because he was the royal heir. The Baron can't even claim to be happy about himself as a person since he's likely smart enough to recognise himself as being a friendless, horrifically obese, sociopathic misanthrophe with a terrible off-putting personality. Bison is oddly somewhat inspirational. The Baron by contrast is a pitiful pathetic loser.
Outstanding essay! Evil is the thing, that helps weak people feel strong. Very true. Thank you!
What? This film is cinematic genius.
maybe watch the video before commenting? cause the video praises the movie.
Wasn't expecting a video essay from this channel but this is pretty entertaining
I think Peter Stormare gets there at times. In Constantine, a bit in Fargo, definitely in John Wick 2, The King's Man. Incidentally, one of my favorite actors over the last 20 years. He is obviously having a blast and it shines through. I want to go to pancakes house, too, dude. I feel you.
This was a truly marvelous, thoughtful, insightful essay. The build to the conclusion was logical, fun and the last 2 mins were truly satisfying.
This is a great video and I appreciate your opinion.
Magnificent. I often comment we've lost the theatrical side of film, and gone for too much realism. Realism is all well and good, but sometimes I want to just be entertained. Thank you again for doing another video game suggestion. The only one i'd have like you to hit in this video essay was Jeremy Irons in Dungeon and Dragons 2000, which along with his partially blue-lipped sidekick, gave a performance that ended his career, to be fair that film ended several careers. Though for me I didn't care about the over the top nature of it, because I can look at some films and just see them as theatrical performances. When there is Richard O'Brien of crystal maze fame in the same film being outdone for flashy, hammy performances it's definitely one to reference :D. Probably explains why I like movies like Hackers, because its absurd, and still the energy of Matthew Lillard was very fun to watch Checkout Dungeons & Dragons 2000 Highlights for irons clips. All the best.
Great video!
No George 😔
5:40 While that's true, it's interesting to show that all the binge eating has done nothing for him, the sheer ahedonia of overindulgence is a very good counterpoint to the aristocratic restraint of the Atriedies, or the outright spartan asceticism of the Fremen.
Well stated.
Except Lynch’s dune is totally different in tone than Frank Herbert’s novel.
It is a good movie. You know it is because we're still talking about it. Meanwhile I couldn't tell you what movies got an Oscar for anything in the past ten years.
Van Dam trying to sound like a southerner actually sounds more Russian than the "Russian guy" in Doctor Strange Love.
Lori: My ex-husband took off with my bankbook, my car, my good vibrator, my wigs... Lori: I was never superhuman, never super powered. I was never as interesting as Superman. Judy Pope: But... Lori: I mean, come on, face it. Technically the guy's an alien, right? 😄
The best portrayal of Satan came from Andy Hamilton in 'Old Harry's Game'. It may have been a sitcom on radio 4. But it showed Satan as very sympathetic and larger than life in his villainy at the same time.
This the best so far. It deep look at a subjet without glossing over the Awfulness of this movie
Even as a kid I was like wth is this, but yes, Bison was cool.
After watching the John Wick Chapter 3 video on Cinebinge, someone in the comment gave me an idea, try Double Dragon starring Mark Dacascos (who played the bald assassin Zero in Chapter 3) and Alyssa Milano another so bad it's good video game adaptation but please watch some good movies of his like Only the Strong, 1997 Drive: Director's Cut, Crying Freeman or Brotherhood of the Wolf first.
What is Street Fighter doing here???? Lol I loved this one, it's 90s cheese at its finest!
Cringe?! How DARE you! Actually, pointing out the Baron in Dune 2021, one can't help but think of Ian McShane's representation of the Baron in the 99 miniseries. HE is an example of incredible campy/haminess indulgence in the representation of the character, I think better than the guy in the 84 movie.
Ian McNiece. But hey, Ian McShane could have made an interesting Baron.
Thanks for the video!! See you later!! Stay safe.😁
Nice timing with EVO, assuming it was intentional.
I guess this is why many people were annoyed by Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face performance, it didn't make sense in-universe for him being so campy and over the top like a cringe version of Joker and unnecessary since Jim Carrey already provided lots of unhinged cheese. Except Edward Nygma (or at least, that version) is totally a madman, a total manchild mad scientist obsessed with image and trying to come off as a genius even though he's absolutely nuts about being rejected by Bruce, his demeanor made sense. Two-Face, Harvey Dent, used to be a composed and committed man of the law who fought against crime and the scarring he received drove him to a FURIOUS type of madness in which he believes justice to be pure random chance. Race-lifting aside even when Billy Dee Williams played him in the 1989 film we saw the type of person Harvey was... and becoming this giggling clownish dude who won't shut up just feels jarring and random. _Where_ did this come from after what we saw of him? "Well, he's crazy so of course he acts unexpected!" please, DON'T use that lazy af argument to defend lazy writing and poor choices -_- By that logic I could've written that Two-Face believes to be a chicken and poops everywhere thinking he's laying eggs and say "Shuttup, he's just crazy y'know!" to defend it. It doesn't really make sense for Harvey to behave like this. Even the 1989 film did this right by establishing how mood-swinging Jack Napier is before he became the Joker, and Nicholson himself has explained that Jack Napier deep down was always a terrifying artsy and pretentious monster clown madman and falling into the chemicals washed away what little composure and humanity he had and became his true self. If anything, it would've been better if Two-Face was a more contained and cold villain to contrast The Riddler's more unhinged presence, would've been an amusing contrast and Two-Face can still have _some_ moments of camp in his own way, I'm not asking him to be dead serious, just as you said, give him a larger than life figure that is in-universe grounded and makes sense to his character. Instead we got The Riddler making friends with another silly screaming manchild villain who is WAAAAY goofier than Jack Nicholson's Joker and it just didn't feel right.
I think part of the problem is filmmakers wanting to make movies darker and more "realistic," That's all fine and good but the problem is they take it too far.
Gr8 video...all the reasons why we LOVE the bad stuff
They should have done a serious Street Fighter movie about the tournament instead of this stupid thing.
If there was ever a time to justify chewing the scenery this is it.
Ok just started this video, but here goes, street fighter is my favorite game franchise, but when ever this movie got made they didn't even pretend to use the source material, someone said guile is the main hero but he's not, but don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. This movie is about as good as the heroclix set with the same name.
Nice secgway into american pie.
I miss this so much, as a Child of the 90's. This is why modern movies do not work, including Disney. No excellent villains, compare Lion King 1994 to Lion King 2020 and the change is obvious. They wanted to be more politically correct (Fine by me) but they didn't find an actor of colour that could do a campy performance of Scar (Or just bring back Jeremy Irons if all else fails), which is needed for the film to be memorable so we had boring Scar and the movie was terrible.
His was the only decent performance in that shocker of a film.
The Gacy painting of Bison was Raul's idea for the character.