Kitao Sakurai’s take on Capcom’s iconic Street Fighter franchise is earnest, horny, and a refreshing throwback to 90s action flicks.
Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter is the latest attempt to adapt the beloved Capcom video game, though it’s far from the first. That came in 1994 — just seven years after the first game was released — and there’s been almost a dozen different attempts across film and television since. But this one is different. It’s the first feature-length American adaptation actually attempting to stick with the source material, something the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme/Raul Julia vehicle and The Legend of Chun-Li never could be bothered with.
This Street Fighter centers on Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo), two hotheads raised in a fighting dojo by Gouken (Don Lee). They’re close enough to be brothers, but not quite close enough for audiences to feel uncomfortable with just how homoerotic the film is. Ryu and Ken live to fight, but Gouken fears Ryu might actually be too good at it. When Gouken is murdered at the hands of his brother Akuma (Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i), Ryu and Ken split, with Ken becoming a famous and emotionally destitute prizefighter and Ryu living a quiet life in exile and eschewing violence altogether.
Years later, the megalomaniacal despot M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) has created a device that allows him to steal power from great fighters. Bison intends to turn the device on Ryu, whom he has been obsessed with ever since he saw him punch a man in half. To lure Ryu out of hiding, Bison resurrects the long-abandoned World Warrior Tournament. The event succeeds in bringing Ryu into the open, but it also puts both Ryu and Ken in the path of undercover INTERPOL agent Chun-Li (Callina Liang), who sees the event as an opportunity to finally take Bison down.
Feast your eyes.
Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures
Fans of the series will pretty quickly recognize this as an adaptation of the 1991 video game Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and more specifically its 1994 anime adaptation Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which it pays direct tribute to during the film’s several animated segments. But there’s no real background in the franchise itself required to enjoy. That said, viewers will benefit if they enter with an understanding of the basic visual aesthetics of the 1990s. This is a period piece through and through, and one of the loudest period pieces I’ve seen in some time. It takes place in 1993 and it is not going to let you forget it. There’s shot-on-VHS sequences, countless needle drops, and extremely colorful outfits and sets.
And honestly? Thank goodness. As Hollywood continues to forget that color grading ever existed, it’s extremely refreshing to see a major Hollywood production so deliberate in its appearance. Street Fighter is a visual feast, with every onscreen element of this film being the result of clear and obvious intent. That Sakurai is able to pull that off in a narrative that takes place largely in an industrial zone when the live-action Moana can make a tropical island look grey is proof that today’s films only lack color because we’ve stopped putting in the effort.
The film’s fight choreography is equally impressive. The focus is largely on practical stunts and wire fu, with digital assists being used less as a substitute for action than a way to add exaggerations, giving some of the blows a more video game-y feel. It is very obvious that much of the main cast has put in the work to be doing most of these fights themselves, with Liang especially knocking it out of the park but Koji, Centineo, Rayna Vallandingham, and Vidyut Jammwal all shining.
Body language.
Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures
Street Fighter is also a throwback to the ’90s in other ways. First, it is unapologetic in its portrayal of over-the-top masculinity. It manages enough nuance that some of the people who would have cheered it on thirty years ago will now call it woke, but this is a film about big beefy boys who get sad and break things with their really big muscles. When they’re mad they punch each other a bit until everything is fine. They go out of their way to show that they’d die for one another yet never verbalize actual emotions. We don’t get this much in today’s media, and that is a mistake. Street Fighter shows that there is room for portrayals of masculinity that use humor and hyperbole to show what parts of it are worth holding on to.
Second, this is one of the horniest movies Hollywood has released in several years. This is, after all, a film where some of the most beautiful people alive pretend to beat each other up. The over-the-top masculinity on several occasions crosses the line into outright homoeroticism. And sexuality is frequently used to demonstrate the extent to which a character is strong, funny, or evil. The film never risks straying from the boundaries of its PG-13 rating, but it’s far more reminiscent of what the rating looked like thirty years than what it looks like today, where Hollywood and sex are (like Ryu and Ken at the beginning of the movie) just not really spending as much time together as they used to.
Most importantly, Street Fighter is entirely unapologetic in its love of the Street Fighter franchise. Street Fighter has been around for just short of forty years. It has been through highs and lows and the utterly weird things in between. Street Fighter loves all of it. It does not attempt to tone down the silliness of the lore or the outrageousness of its characters. This is perhaps most obvious in the haircut of Guile (Cody Rhodes), which is a stunning contrast to what Van Damme was sporting when he played the character in 1994. But it’s readily apparent in nearly every element of the dialogue, the costumes, and Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson’s score. Street Fighter is completely earnest, and that earnestness means it has no problem convincing viewers why they should care about this series.
The bottom line.
It’s still not perfect. How energetic the film is in its first two acts means the climax doesn’t really get to, well… climax. The film’s inability to bump things up an additional notch mean the film just maintains a basic equilibrium until the credits roll, resulting in a sequel tease that is more confusing than it is exciting simply because it’s not actually obvious the film is ending. And there’s certainly going to be a bunch of people wondering where Zangief (Oliver Richters) disappears to. But some general clumsiness isn’t enough to change just how fun Street Fighter is. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
Street Fighter is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer below.
Images courtesy of Paramout Pictures.
REVIEW RATING
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Street Fighter - 8/10
8/10
Brogan Luke Bouwhuis is a writer and film programmer whose frequent pop culture deep dives have allowed him to write about everything from the Richard Gere gerbil rumor to the history of the holiday yule log video. He co-hosts the Franchise Fiends podcast, co-captains the narrative shorts program at the Slamdance Film Festival, and co-created three children with his wife, Jessica.
