The 1994 Street Fighter movie — Van Damme, Raul Julia, ten million dollars, and cocaine — became a camp classic precisely because it committed fully to its own absurdity. The new version knows it's silly, keeps winking at you about it, and then refuses to climb any higher than the thing it's winking at. That's a different failure mode, and a more frustrating one. The architecture of the problem is visible early. Director Takashi Miike-adjacent chaos might have suited this material; what we get instead is a screenplay that treats character introductions like a Pokedex scroll. Every iconic fighter from the games must appear, must demonstrate their signature move, must receive at least a gesture toward backstory. The result isn't an ensemble — it's a queue. M. Bison organizes a world championship tournament for nefarious purposes, which is exactly as much plot as this film needs and also exactly as much plot as this film develops. The exception that proves the rule is a hotel-room brawl between Ken (Noah Centineo) and Ryu (Andrew Koji), staged early and staged well. Ken throws wild haymakers; Ryu slips them with a pillow, tucks the pillow under Ken's head as he wipes out, tiptoes away from him on a sofa. It's physical comedy with genuine timing, and it makes you aware of how little the rest of the film trusts its own performers to carry weight through movement. The Raging Bull cross-cutting during the Ken-versus-Balrog bout (50 Cent, committed) is another brief moment where the director clearly watched something useful. Callina Liang as Chun-Li is the film's actual load-bearing column. Her physical performance during fight sequences is the real thing — she is trained, present, and fast in a way the editing doesn't always deserve — and her character function as the movie's reality anchor actually works. When Ken or Ryu launch into Van Damme-style philosophizing, Chun-Li calls it out flatly as stupid. The joke lands. It would land harder if the movie were willing to be the smarter film she's performing in. Vidyut Jammwal, trained in Kalaripayattu, gets too little screen time as Dhalsim; Cody Rhodes, in a cartoonish trapezoid blond wig as Guile, is genuinely funny. Andrew Schulz as Ken's manager — a man who monetizes his client's id while protecting his ego — gives a performance that actually has subtext, which makes it feel slightly alien to the surrounding material. The film's self-awareness is its most sophisticated feature and also its alibi. It knows the 90s setting is cringe; it knows the hypersexualization of Chun-Li was cringe; it gives Liang a gratuitous slow-motion shower scene anyway and then has her character deliver knowing verbal jabs about male stupidity. The critique and the thing being critiqued occupy the same frame simultaneously, which isn't irony — it's having it both ways. Garish early-90s texture — UHF-quality MTV segments, MC Hammer, New Kids on the Block energy for Ken's celebrity backstory — is deployed as aesthetic rather than examined as content. Mortal Kombat (2021) set the functional ceiling for this genre: coherent enough to follow, violent enough to satisfy, with at least one fight scene (the opening Cole Young-versus-Sub-Zero sequence) that justified the runtime. Street Fighter doesn't clear that bar consistently. The Ken-Ryu hotel fight and scattered Chun-Li moments are above it; the rest is lateral. After Resident Evil — Zach Cregger's adaptation that apparently found a way to make Capcom source material into a film with a point of view — Street Fighter's self-satisfied nostalgia loop feels like a step back toward the 1994 baseline it's theoretically embarrassed by.
