Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Street Fighter Ken Masters is a joke, or so everybody says about the blond, beautiful, buff guy. His estranged best friend and adoptive brother Ryu, meanwhile is the real master of martial arts and the winner of the first World Warrior Tournament, where something evil awakens within him. So when a second tournament is announced, a face-off between the once-inseparable brothers is billed as the main attraction, while a far more sinister plot unfolds behind the scenes.
Director Kitao Sakurai, along with writers T.J. Fixman and Dalan Musson, brings Capcom’s Street Fighter to life with truckloads of ’90s nostalgia, serving up MTV, mesh tops and a whole lot of random madness. Andrew Koji plays Ryu, who disappears from public life after winning the first tournament, while Ken becomes a celebrity fighter managed by his friend Dan Hibiki (Andrew Schulz). Chun-Li (Callina Liang), an undercover agent working to expose the villainous Bison (David Dastmalchian), a megalomaniac and wannabe dictator, recruits the estranged brothers for the second tournament.
The film opens with some fantastic comic-book-style 2D animation, flashing back to Ryu and Ken training under Master Gouken (Ma Dong-seok) before they go their separate ways. Once the story shifts to the present, Street Fighter adopts a distinctly late-’80s/early-’90s visual style, complete with deliberately grainy, less-than-HD-looking sequences designed to crank up the nostalgia for viewers who grew up in those decades. So much so that watching the film often feels like opening a time capsule. The dated dialogue and highly formulaic screenplay only add to that feeling, but the cast does a fantastic job of making a rather mediocre, random script work.
At almost two hours long, Street Fighter has far too many fighters to do justice to any of them. Even protagonists Ryu and Ken sometimes feel like they don’t have enough room in their own film! Eric André is hilarious as ring announcer Don Sauvage, while practically everybody else turns up the theatrics in the ring. There’s Cody Rhodes as Guile, sporting a cartoonish blond flat-top that looks like a stiff, upturned mop, and Vidyut Jammwal as the mystical yogi Dhalsim, who looks like he’s walked straight out of the game. And Street Fighter actually gives Jason Momoa a far more comically memorable role as Blanka than Supergirl did with his turn as Lobo.
I only recently watched the 2021 Mortal Kombat movie, based on a game I played far more often as a kid, and felt that half its cast couldn’t quite capture the exaggerated, larger-than-life personalities of their gaming counterparts. But here, almost everybody in Street Fighter brings just the right kind of over-the-top energy to their role. David Dastmalchian, for instance, absolutely nails the classic villainous cackle, bringing an almost wicked-witch-like quality to Bison and giving him a gleefully creepy, sadomasochistic streak.
But it’s Noah Centineo as Ken Masters who I found the most endearingly likeable character in Street Fighter. He’s nothing like the teen heartthrob from the To All the Boys… franchise. Here, he’s a hilarious diva and goofball rolled into one: dumb, sloppy, but also passionate, kind-hearted and generally a chaotically entertaining ball of energy. He’s especially impressive in his fight scenes with Ryu, pulling off some genuinely whoa-inducing flips. Andrew Koji’s serious, angst-ridden, monosyllabic Ryu makes a hilarious foil to the endlessly chatty Ken.
Unlike a lot of action movies that seem to skimp on hand-to-hand combat these days, this one features a generous helping of well-choreographed physical fights. And while they’re not quite Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan-level exciting, the action sequences are definitely fun to watch. The film also dedicates a fair amount of time to animated flashbacks, a clever way of exploring the characters’ pasts. In fact, with so many colourful fighters and backstories to explore, it almost makes you wish Street Fighter were a series, so that everybody could get their own character arcs.
The pacing can be choppy, and I’m not a fan of how heavily the cinematography leans into dark, neo-noir tones, especially when the ’80s and ’90s were all about colour. Quite a few stretches also lack the upbeat energy you’d expect from something this gloriously ridiculous. But overall, Street Fighter is worth a trip to the theatre for action fans, whether they’ve played the original games or not. And yes, I’d 100% watch a Street Fighter 2!
Rating for ‘Street Fighter’: 3 stars on 5.
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