While the video game genre as a whole can hardly claim to have pulled off a perfect round (yet), it’s certainly in the best shape it’s ever been by far. While the likes of the Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy, Fallout, The Last Of Us and this year’s Resident Evil have rubbed some much needed quality onto proceedings, other, less glowing attempts such as the Super Mario Movies, have still raked in enough cash to ensure that the early, dark days of video game adaptations remain back in the 90s where they belong.
However, one of those original titles that gave the genre such a bad reputation in the first place was the infamous Street Fighter, a film that tried to slap the iconic Street Fighter 2 onto the big screen and instead gave us one of the most famously chaotic productions in film history. Well, just over thirty years later, it seems that the world of Ryu, Ken, Bison and Guile is set for an overdue rematch as it limbers up to take another shot at scoring a K.O. at the box office. Can a bunch of visibly excited actors finally do justice to one of the most famous fighting games in history? Or at the very least, not cast a man with a thick, Belgian-French accent as the all-American Guile?
Back in 1987, the first World Warrior tournament is won by the Japanese-born Ryu when he takes out his rival in the final with a corrupted form of his martial art. However, while adopted brother and fellow student Ken Masters looks on, the act manages to gain the attention of their mentor’s evil brother, Akuma, who has since become a demonic entity after abusing the fighting style in a simular manner. In the resulting fracas, mentor Gouken is killed and Ryu and Ken fall out.
Years later, Ken is a celebrity who is a laughing stock due to the goofy publicity stunts he does to keep up his fame, and Ryu lives as a simple hobo who sells pigeon soup to tourists. However, evil, power hungry dictator, M. Bison, has decided to hold a second world warrior tournament in an attempt to draw Ryu out of hiding in the hope of draining that corrupted power out of him for his own ends. As the call goes out to the various, colourful lunatics who would gleefully sign up for a fighting tournament, undercover Interpol agent Chun-Li attempts to find allies among such ludicrous bruisers as the vertical haired American G.I., Guile; stretchy limbed Indian, Dhalsim; or hulking Russian, Zangief; to stand against Bison’s similarly eccentric henchmen, Vega, Cammy, or Balrog.
But when her attempts to get Ryu back in the game fail, Chun-Li turns to the washed-up Ken instead, only to find that the car-punching himbo is having some major issues with self-belief. Can this motley crew of fighters manage to form some sort of coalition to stand against the forces of evil – and even if they are triumphant, won’t victory only just summon Akuma once more?
I’m not sure what the hell I was expecting from the second attempt to bring Capcom’s renowned beat ’em into live action, but judging by the trailers, director Kitao Sakurai was hoping to deliver a 50 megaton nuke of absurdist fighting, overzealous fan service and maximalist tone setting that would probably require everyone involved to deliver a third of their dialogue at screaming pitch. To be fair, that’s what I would have expected from an adaption with such a strange gathering of participants (I’m not exaggerating when I say the casting is unhinged), and it would have been the wisest route to take, if only to try and make sense of a flamboyant, masked assassin and green Brazilian monster with electrocution powers being in the same story. However, while Sakuri and arguably the year’s most random cast (Cody Rhodes? Andrew Schulz? 50 Cent? David Dastmalchian? Jason Momoa?) do everything in their conceivable power to avoid falling into the same pitfalls as the 1994 version, we end up with something just as messy.
However, the finished result is only half successful at vanquishing a ghost of a film so deranged, a haze of cocaine dust blows around it like a dust devil. While Street Fighter ’26 takes great pains to avoid awkwardly rewriting game lore like it’s predecessor, it does so at the expense of anything approaching a conventional plot. Seriously, while this movie can certainly boast a beginning, it’s frantic story-telling beats are in such a state of disarray, the film barely has a middle and, thanks to some shameless sequel baiting, it certainly doesn’t have an end. It’s a shame, because one thing that does emanate from the film like waves of Psycho power is that literally everybody involved obviously adores the source game. As someone who loved to bash a few buttons himself back in the day (Ken, Vega and Blanka were my guys, in case you were wondering), it’s actually quite gratifying to see the gang on screen, looking, acting and fighting in a way that’s incredibly faithful to their 16-bit inspirations.
Similarly, the film and everyone in it are wisely in on the joke that this story of mismatched fighters from across the world banding together to fireball a despot is utterly, utterly stupid in a way that video games thrillingly are. However, the fluctuating tone that veers drunkenly from self-parody to anime-style melodrama only partially works, with the scattershot jokes mostly missing rather that hitting. Furthermore, Street Fighter makes the same mistake made by the 2021 Mortal Kombat film by marginalising the actual tournament as an odd joke. Some characters (E. Honda, Zangief) take early showers after minimal screen time, while others (Dan, Joe, Don Sauvage) are repeatedly shoved front and centre as jokes that only partially work. As a result, more central faces such as Cody Rhodes’ Guile seem sadly underused, which seems odd seeing as he got his own popcorn bucket promotion. Earlier this year, Masters Of The Universe managed to do self-parody far better, while Mortal Kombat II nailed that beat ’em up aesthetic with way more accuracy – I mean, it actually had a proper tournament for a start…
Still, whenever the film manages to land an actual punch, it legitimately sticks. Andrew Koji’s Ryu, Noah Centino’s Ken and Callina Liang’s Chun-Li are legitimate stand-outs and the CGI/Momoa/Blanka hybrid works way better than it has any right to. Elsewhere, Dastmalchian’s Bison knows he can’t out-camp Raul Julia, so he wisely takes the sardonic route, flashbacks are rendered in glorious animation that recall the awesome anime from ’94, and the truly heroic glut of easter eggs, sounds effects and the fact that the characters legitimately fight the way the way they do in the games is genuinely impressive. However, the fact that it feels like it’s tumbled out of the brain of an over stimulated twelve-year old (complete with numerous close-ups of Chun-Li’s admittedly formidable butt) may sound perfect on paper, but in practice it’s just a big, noisy mess that mistakes fan service for plot.
While admittedly fun in an annoying kind of way, Street Fighter manages to clear the bar set by its riotous predecessor – but only just. It’s obsessive dedication to the bit must be applauded – even if it means Eric André bellows a sizable amount of his lines through a bullhorn – but if we ever get a round 2, a bit of rudimentary storytelling and character work wouldn’t go amiss.
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