Street Fighter has an immediate advantage over many movies adapted from games. Most people remember the particular indignity of losing to somebody standing two feet away. The tournament is already a social situation. Kitao Sakurai leans into that feeling with a 1993 setting and a cast prepared to wear the character designs in public. The pleasure is seeing which pieces of the game become playable as human behavior. The movie can win a round on the strength of a performer’s attitude. It needs something else to keep those rounds from feeling interchangeable.
Andrew Koji’s Ryu and Noah Centineo’s Ken are estranged when Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. That history gives Koji’s reserve and Centineo’s appetite for attention somewhere to go. Ken can play to the room while trying to get a specific response from the one man who knows him. Ryu’s seriousness can look like dignity or an effort to deny him that response. The pair have a viable comedy before they even start fighting. It occasionally seems as though the tournament has been built around finding reasons to separate them from it.
The year is good for more than wardrobe and references. A tournament in this 1993 can still resemble a rumor people hear about and decide to take seriously. Its existence has an underground appeal. Sakurai can let a contender arrive with all the evidence of a reputation we have never been asked to verify. When the movie behaves like an official reunion of familiar faces, it gives up some of that feeling. The live possibility of seeing somebody embarrassing himself before an audience whose opinions he needs is more entertaining than another assurance that the fighter looks like he ought to.
Callina Liang’s Chun-Li enters with a purpose of her own and the confidence to put the two men to work. Liang is able to suggest how quickly the character takes stock of the people she needs. The film is less sure of what to do with that authority once it has her in the frame. A conspicuous shower sequence is one measure of the difference. The woman who controls what Ken and Ryu know about the tournament could plausibly control the film’s point of view for stretches. Instead the camera sometimes treats her as one more attraction to be rolled out.
The roster poses a similar problem on a larger scale. A fighting game can leave space around someone like Guile or Zangief because selecting a character is itself an act of attention. A film has to decide when that person can change the room and when a memorable costume will do. Sakurai’s comic background serves the sudden appearance of an absurd personality. A joke can arrive with a stance or an extravagant piece of hair. There is less pleasure when the rhythm starts to resemble introductions at an event where everyone has been promised a moment onstage.
The fights have a clean dramatic resource whenever a pairing means something outside the bracket. Ryu and Ken can read one another with an intimacy they would rather deny. An opponent unfamiliar with either of them can discover something about the men through their styles before the script catches up. The conspiracy gives the cast an external problem to share, but it also eats into the time in which the bouts might develop that kind of information. The revelations behind the contest are broadly intelligible and rarely as funny as the egos on display in it.
David Dastmalchian’s M. Bison has a particularly tricky position in that parade. The character needs to bring a degree of menace the film can keep in reserve even when the image is having fun with him. There is a difference between letting a performer act absurdly because he is powerful enough to get away with it and treating every sign of power as a cue for a joke. It is a difference the movie could have turned to its advantage. A tournament is funniest when the fighters take their chances seriously enough for the audience to enjoy the disproportion in the first place.
The period helps by allowing the movie to be openly garish. An adaptation trying to make these characters look inconspicuous would surrender a basic part of their appeal. The stronger possibility here is to let the absurdity affect the way people actually size one another up. A performer can use a ridiculous entrance to get an opponent to take the wrong thing seriously. That idea of fighting as performance is rich enough to sustain a movie. Street Fighter touches it often, then gets pulled back toward making sure everyone and everything from the cabinet has arrived.
There is a useful sense of collective entertainment underneath the disorder. The extravagant poses have a social function. Ken can make a crowd expect one kind of fight and be obliged to deliver another once someone steps into his range. The premise offers more ways to put a performer under that pressure than the movie ultimately uses. Sakurai’s liveliest instinct is to show someone who looks made for a poster having to find a response on the spot. The interest falls away when the story has space only for the poster.
