The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud is a kindred spirit to the 1994 Street Fighter movie while avoiding its pitfalls. Max Cloud features Scott Adkins as its title character, and both the role and the film as a whole are major switches from his past work in edgier, R-rated martial arts films like Undisputed and Avengement. As a more family-oriented action-comedy, Max Cloud is essentially the equivalent to Street Fighter in Adkins' filmography, and that curiously is a compliment of the movie rather than a criticism.
Hitting theaters just in time for Christmas back in 1994, Street Fighter remains infamous to this day, among both fans of the games and mainstream audiences, as a poor reflection of its namesake and an all-around cocktail of absurdity. Not that that's stopped it from achieving a high degree of affection in the hearts of many, with the late Raul Julia's hellacious performance as M. Bison a genuine treat from a true thespian. Street Fighter fans eventually saw the franchise done outstanding justice in 2014's Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist, while its 1994 predecessor is enjoyed more for its campiness than being a real tribute to the games that inspired it.
All of those are traits just as central to Max Cloud, and yet this not only makes it a marvelously fun video game adventure, it also flips the script on how profoundly out of whack Street Fighter was. Max Cloud may be every ridiculous as Street Fighter was, but it also knows just how to use that in all the right ways to be the wacky sci-fi comedy adventure that it is. Here's how Max Cloud learned the lessons of Street Fighter to make itself into the hilarious, silly video game comedy that it is.
Comparisons to the first Street Fighter movie wouldn’t exactly strike one as a compliment, but frankly, a stunning number of parallels exist between the two, starting with what they represent in the careers of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Scott Adkins. Both films represent a transition by their respective leading men into a more family-friendly adventure from the harder action films each was previously known for. Both also happened to drop in close proximity to Christmas Day in their years of release, which might seem like a superficial detail on the surface, but this also is a factor in the biggest parallel they share.
Street Fighter was an adaptation of the eponymous fighting game franchise, specifically Street Fighter II, while Max Cloud is a video game brought to life, and with more than a few references to Street Fighter, specifically. With both movies intrinsically tied to the video game genre, the holiday season release of each is naturally meant to kid-appropriate movies that can be enjoyed by all during family gatherings (both of the Jumanji sequels pulled off this exact trick to colossal box office success). However, Street Fighter infamously dropped the ball on that in some major ways.
Street Fighter made the mistake of stretching its source material too thin by trying to be too much to too many people. Wanting to be edgy enough to appeal to fans of the game and action movie lovers, yet far too goofy to take seriously, Street Fighter was too uncommitted to a clear direction to effectively please anyone. Not helping matters was how overpopulated with the game’s characters the movie was, and how adrift many of them were left as a result (writer-director Steven E. DeSouza of Die Hard fame initially persuaded Capcom to a roster of seven main characters, but the mandates of the game’s publisher eventually led to 16 being included). In trying to be an age-neutral cartoon wrapped in a war movie, Street Fighter ended up pleasing no one.
That’s not to write off Street Fighter as not being an entertaining movie, though, especially for the late Raul Julia’s legendarily campy performance as M. Bison, which was worth quadruple the admission price all on its own. As Bison, Julia was one of the most quotable supervillains in cinema history, from his Sagat eye-patch diss to his immortal “For me, it was Tuesday” speech. With practically everything else about Street Fighter occupying so-bad-its-good territory, Julia’s performance made Street Fighter a rewatchable joy amid the cemetery of video game movies. Street Fighter’s shortcomings were many, so it’s rather surprising that Max Cloud should not only follow the same blueprint, but actually pull it off in a genuinely successful way.
Max Cloud is no less of an absurd video game movie romp than Street Fighter was, but it's also fully aware of - and more importantly, fully committed to - exactly what it's trying to be. The mistake Street Fighter made was in trying to appeal to too wide a demographic with a goofy tone that nullified such ambitions. On the other hand, Max Cloud just sets out to tells its story of a video game adventure purely on its own bonkers terms, and consequently, is far more able to pull in viewers from all across the board because of how frank it is about itself right upfront.
The against type performances of Raul Julia and Scott Adkins also work in the favor of both movies in opposite ways. Julia delivered the hammiest villain performance imaginable, quite clearly aware of what kind of movie he was in, and with so much of the film around him backfiring, he ended up being the highlight of an action-comedy gone off the rails. Max Cloud essentially has Adkins playing the same kind of bombastic, larger-than-life character in its hero, but without the veneer of the movie around him trying to be taken as a serious action film. Max Cloud essentially takes the flaws of Street Fighter and places them in a context where they're actual virtues, the campiness of both films finding a groove where it really and works as intended in the former.
Street Fighter ultimately failed by trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, wanting to appeal to the widest audience without adjusting its nonsensical tone and premise to accommodate such aspirations. Max Cloud comes right out of the same school of comedic camp, but also takes the inverse route, making no secret about just what it is and inspiring the curiosity of viewers to give it a look. Should Max Cloud 2 happen, it'd be wise to also avoid the (even more disastrous) mistakes of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but if the first Max Cloud is anything to go by, it already knows what it's doing.
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