21. BACK TO THE FUTURE DAY: Really though, any time travel flick will do the trick.
Long before Hollywood handed $35 million to Steven E. de Souza to make the 1994 official Street Fighter movie—and decades before Legendary Pictures decided to try again with their upcoming live-action reboot—director Wong Jing did it. Released in July 1993, Jing had already flirted with Capcom’s crown jewel six months earlier in Jackie Chan’s City Hunter (remember that iconic arcade fight scene where Jackie turns into Chun-Li?), but with Future Cops, he went full-blown, unhinged, copyright-infringing superhero spectacle.
The plot isn’t just loosely inspired by video games; it outright lifts the structure of James Cameron’s The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, throws it into a high school comedy blender, and hits “puree.”
In the dystopian future of 2043, an evil crime syndicate led by The General (M. Bison, played as a terrifying, fireproof cyborg by Ken Lo) is on trial. To stop the judge from convicting him, his top lieutenants—Kent (Ken Masters, played by Ekin Cheng), Thai King (Sagat, played by Billy Chow) and Toyota (E. Honda, played by William Duen)—hop into a time machine and travel 50 years into the past to 1993. Their mission? Kill the judge while he’s still an easily identifiable, 28-year-old high school student named Chan Tai-hung (Dicky Cheung).
Not so fast! Enter the Future Cops, who are Ti Man / Vega (Andy Lau, complete with the claw, half-mask, and flying acrobatics), Broomhead / Guile (Jacky Cheung, sporting the iconic flat-top hair), Sing / Dhalsim (Simon Yam with stretching arms) and Lung / Ryu (Aaron Kwok, showing up in brief, glorious cameos). The Future Cops materialize in 1993 inside a giant glowing sphere—just like Arnie in T2, minus the full-frontal nudity—and immediately go undercover at Tai-hung’s school to protect him. What follows is an absurd mix of high school romance, bully-smashing, cartoonish slapstick and mind-bending action sequences.
This movie is not done playing games, as during a date scene at an arcade, Andy Lau’s Vega and Chingmy Yau’s Chun-Li go into a game of Super Mario World, complete with Mario and Luigi costumes. And when Tai-hung finally unlocks his hidden powers in the third act, he doesn’t just use Street Fighter moves—he literally transforms into Son Goku from Dragon Ball Z.
There’s more: Andy Hui’s character, Kei-on, combines two Dorarmon characters: Suneo (the weird hairstyle and being rich) and Giant (in the Cantonese version of Doraemon, Giant is called Kei-on, and he is a big bully). Dicky Cheung’s character references Doraemon’s Nobita, and Charlie Yeung’s character references Nobita’s crush, Shizuka.
All movies should be this movie.
You can watch this on Tubi.
