最怪的《Street Fighter》电影其实不是《Street Fighter》电影（且完全疯狂）

Hollywood’s having another go at bringing Street Fighter to the big screen. The latest adaptation of Capcom’s popular fighting game is hitting theaters October 16th, starring Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken and Callina Liang as Chun-Li. The film is set in 1993 and returns to the height of the arcade fighting game craze. The 1994 Street Fighter movie featured Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia and a host of familiar characters, but it wasn’t quite the adaptation players hoped it would be. The following year Mortal Kombat did better, embracing the premise of its source material and delivering some impressive martial arts action. Both films benefited from being based on games that were already wildly popular. But a year before Van Damme donned Guile’s uniform, another martial-arts star had already taken Street Fighter II to the big screen. The sequence featured live-action iterations of the game’s iconic fighters, including their signature fighting moves and costumes. It was also one of the weirdest fights Jackie Chan ever had.

In 1993, Jackie Chan starred in City Hunter, a live-action version of the popular manga by Tsukasa Hojo. Written and directed by Wong Jing, the film starred Chan as Ryo Saeba, a private eye who finds himself on a luxury cruise liner while searching for a missing heiress. But unfortunately the vessel is hijacked by a group of terrorists. Ryo has to save the passengers. Among the villains is Kim, played by Gary Daniels, who eventually gets into a fight with Chan’s character inside the ship’s arcade. That’s when things get weird. After the terrorists throw him into a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, Ryo starts imagining the fight as if he’s inside the game. Daniels transforms into Ken, while Chan becomes Dhalsim and E. Honda. It’s not really something that would fly in 2026. Chan also transforms into Chun-Li, complete with her signature blue outfit and hair buns, and unleashes her rapid-fire kicks against Daniels. The sequence recreates the game’s characters, costumes, and fighting moves before Hollywood’s official adaptation arrived in theaters.

A Multi-Styled Street Fighter

One character included in the film had a slight name change. Legend has it that E. Honda became E. Honde because Chan had an endorsement deal with Mitsubishi Motors and using the name of a rival Japanese automaker would have created a conflict. Surprisingly, the scene was not an unauthorized parody. Capcom approved the sequence and received a credit in the movie. The company confirmed its participation in a 2009 retrospective of licensed Street Fighter projects. There’s no sign Capcom financed the scene, but the company’s blessing makes it one of the first officially approved live-action appearances of the game’s characters.

The Street Fighter sequence is one of the weirder moments in Chan’s filmography, but the idea wasn’t totally new. In 1979, Chan directed his first film, The Fearless Hyena, a martial arts comedy in which he played different characters during fights. In one sequence he disguises himself as a woman to confuse an opponent; in another he plays a pseudo-clumsy, cross-eyed character whose clumsy movements disguise his fighting prowess. He even picks up a style of kung fu based on different emotions, going from laughing to crying to anger while fighting. Chan already established himself as a comedic martial artist in Drunken Master, in which he played a young Wong Fei-hung who learns an unconventional fighting style from a frequently inebriated teacher. The film helped to form the mixture of elaborate choreography and comedy that would define much of his career. He expanded on those ideas with 1983’s Project A, adding elaborate stunt work inspired by silent-film comedians. A famous sequence in the film sees Chan hanging from a clock tower and falling through a series of awnings, a stunt echoing Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! By the time he made City Hunter, Chan had been playing with different ways to stage fights for over a decade, and the Street Fighter sequence was another chance to try something new. But it wasn’t his first time in the world of video games.

From Cartoonish Actor to Cartoon Character

Chan himself had already become a video game character, actually predating City Hunter. In 1990 Hudson Soft released Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a side-scrolling action game where players controlled a cartoon version of the actor. The game was made up of five levels of enemies, obstacles, and martial arts challenges. Five years later, Japanese developer Kaneko released The Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan, an arcade fighting game featuring digitized actors in the style of Mortal Kombat. An updated version, Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire, featured multiple playable versions of Chan and drew inspiration from several of his movies. In 2000, he starred in Jackie Chan Stuntmaster for the original PlayStation. Developed by Radical Entertainment, the game featured Chan fighting his way through New York City while trying to rescue his kidnapped grandfather. It incorporated many of the environmental attacks and acrobatic moves audiences had come to expect from his movies. Here’s a video showing Jackuie Chan doing the motin capture for the game:

The cartoonish Chan became an actual cartoon character with Jackie Chan Adventures, which premiered on Kids’ WB on September 9th, 2000. Much like one of his biggest influences, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, the series featured Chan battling supernatural threats. The animated series reimagined him as an archaeologist battling supernatural threats alongside his niece Jade and uncle. James Sie provided the character’s voice, while the real Chan appeared in live-action segments answering questions from viewers. The series ran for five seasons and spawned two video games of its own.

Chan would continue making martial arts movies for decades, including the US crossover hits Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, and the reboot of The Karate Kid. But City Hunter remains a particularly unusual entry in his filmography, arriving at a time when fighting games were becoming a pop culture phenomenon. While Hollywood was preparing its first Street Fighter adaptation, Chan had already managed to squeeze the whole game into one of his movies.