Street Fighters Ryu and Ken reunite when Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. As they face a hidden conspiracy, they must confront each other and their past-or face destruction.
‘Street Fighter’ is the latest attempt to bring Capcom’s hugely popular video game series to the big screen, more than 30 years after the rather notorious Jean-Claude Van Damme adaptation. First released in arcades in 1987, the games became a worldwide phenomenon in the early 1990s, particularly with the success of ‘Street Fighter II’, and it’s this period that provides the setting for the new film. Set in 1993, the story follows former friends and martial artists Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo), who are brought back together by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) to compete in the World Warrior Tournament, where they soon discover that there’s rather more going on behind the scenes than a straightforward fighting competition.
Directed by Kitao Sakurai, it’s a fairly daft affair that makes little attempt to disguise its video game origins, with a colourful collection of characters, exaggerated fight sequences and plenty of references that fans of the games will no doubt appreciate. There’s a decent soundtrack that makes good use of the early 90s setting, and some of the humour works, although most of the jokes are pretty obvious and delivered with little subtlety. The film is clearly aware of how silly much of its material is, which helps to a degree, but there’s still something rather naff about the whole thing, particularly when it tries to make you care about the story beyond the fighting.
I suspect fans of ‘Street Fighter’ will get considerably more out of it than anyone unfamiliar with the games, particularly given how much effort has gone into recreating the characters and their signature moves. There’s some fun to be had, and I appreciated that the filmmakers don’t take the material too seriously, but it doesn’t really amount to much beyond that. It’s a colourful and occasionally amusing adaptation that does a reasonable job of capturing the spirit of the games, but as a film I found it pretty forgettable.
Rating: 2/5
Directed By: Kitao Sakurai
Starring: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Eric André, Andrew Schulz, Vidyut Jammwal, Orville Peck, Don Lee, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Jason Momoa
