Street Fighter

Much too long and convoluted to deliver sustained entertainment, director Kitao Sakurai's Street Fighter is, at least, an honest attempt to organise decades of contradictory video game tournaments into the kind of franchise-launcher not seen since Marvel Studios was in its ascendancy. Capcom's incomparable arcade hit, Street Fighter II, offered up a basic competition framing with blips of a background story rationed out based on a player's ability to clear the game with their favourite character. As far as adaptations have gone then - and there have been many - much has had to be invented to cater to the various and differing mediums that cashed-in, with more notable themes and ideas even being rolled into latter interactive instalments. 

Despite a large cast of characters then, one that largely favours the second game in the series, the key texts for this Street Fighter have turned out to be Masahiko Nakahira's Street Fighter Zero manga, a two volume black-and-white series that first introduced the concept of a murderous power lurking within Ryu, the Japanese all-rounder who is as close as the series gets to a default character, and Street Fighter Zero 2, the 1996 arcade cabinet that allowed a corrupted palette-swap of this what-if character to be selectable. Pushed aside for the all-American Guile in Steven E. de Souza's 1994 Street Fighter and AWOL from 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Ryu is an unusual dramatic proposition largely because he avoids human connection within the various texts, partly to better serve as pure utility for a player's pre-adulthood imagination but also because this wandering warrior fits a particular (and popular) Japanese cultural archetype: the rōnin. 

So, although Gisaburo Sugii's animated Street Fighter II Movie successfully centred around a deliberately blank character with little personal desire, there's a sense that an American blockbuster audience might want a little more meat on their bones. Screenwriters TJ Fixman and Sakurai again (with Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman sharing a story credit) invert the relationship of Ryu and Ken from Sugii's pass, trading an easygoing Ken transformed into a violent pawn of a psychotic dictator with a Ryu that, underwritten by coin-pumped lore, looks set to be similarly claimed. Noah Centineo's Ken is diminished by the trade though, losing his marionette fiancée Eliza (and subjected to ugly AI reproduction for prop photographs) to be crowbarred into the role of a comedic understudy for Andrew Koji's surprisingly conceited Ryu. This is perhaps the most glaring issue with Sakurai's Street Fighter then. By altering characters to fit roles that differ from their more simplistic, video game functions the film must apportion space or dramatic axis to justify these changes. This strained scaffolding is then compounded by inheriting such a massive ensemble, all of whom demand at least a certain amount of attention. As a result Guile, as portrayed by pro-wrestler Cody Rhodes, vanishes into a series of amusing YouTube skit-style asides and Callina Liang's Chun-Li - the character with the clearest filmic motivation - forestalls her revenge for no clear reason, allows her body to be mutilated, and is fobbed off with a moment of triumph in which she beats the shit out of her Interpol colleagues. 

The Outlaws

Ma Dong-seok's Detective Ma may not pack a .44 Magnum or have a sleek Italian firearm holstered under his armpit but he does enjoy instant access to something equally as potent: his enormous, frying pan mitts. Previously, when reviewing his underwhelming Netflix vehicle Badland Hunters, comparisons were drawn between Ma Dong-seok and a heavyweight boxer. Really though, especially when compared to the much slighter, even weaselly criminals roaming the mean streets of Seoul, Ma's atypical bulk (presumably cultivated when the star was an amateur arm wrestler) is closer to that of a pro-wrestler, specifically an 80s All-Japan superstar. Like, say, a Toshiaki Kawada, Ma may have a round, pleasant babyface but his expertise when transmitting pain is studied and adept. In some of the film's most crucial moments we can see Detective Ma weighing up just how hard he needs to go when restraining his quarry. Is it enough to have control of a criminal's arm while he thrashes around on the floor? Or does Ma need to snap a wrist then drag that squealing man around to make him submit? Director Kang Yun-seong's The Outlaws is the first in the pulled-from-the-headlines Roundup series, an opening instalment quickly followed by (to date) three further entries. Outlaws is a lightly xenophobic (not to mention overwhelmingly pro-cop) tale of invading Chinese criminals who upset the balance of a working class neighbourhood with their boundless enthusiasm for knife crime and extortion. Really though Ma's swaggering detective is the main attraction: a brawny friend-to-children who scams superiors and local lawbreakers alike for the snack money that has enabled him to build a body so massive that, and this is repeatedly stressed, he simply cannot reach around the complete circumference of his bicep. 

Badland Hunters

Dramatically, Badland Hunters never raises above the level of a streaming pilot. Director Heo Myeong-haeng's film presents itself as a sort of orphan project that introduces a few too many characters then doesn't really make a tremendous amount of effort to wring their post-apocalyptic wants dry. Anyway, there's an apartment complex, the only one still standing in a city otherwise reduced to rubble; a mad scientist who runs the building, attracting dilatory survivors with promises of clean water and cushy condominiums; and a standing garrison of reptilian grunts who cannot wait to charge at incoming gunfire. Of course, none of that dressing matters when you have the swaggering brawn of Ma Dong-seok to hand. Indeed the pained attempts at character investment that clog up the film's first hour melt away the instant that Nam, Ma's wasteland butcher, finds his way to this concrete experiment camp and starts hurling haymakers. Previously the best thing in Train to Busan and The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (not to mention, thoroughly wasted in Marvel's excretable Eternals), Ma is a sensational action proposition: the guy is enormous; a sardonic strong-man able to weave and strike like a heavyweight boxer. Director Heo (whose previous credits include martial arts co-ordinator on Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird) cues up several corridors filled with human garbage just begging to be mulched by Nam's fists, pump-action shotgun and the saw-toothed machete that hangs (just out of reach) across his enormous shoulders. Heo isn't a one-trick pony either, tailoring several sprier, but no less exhilarating, action encounters around Ahn Ji-hye's Lee Eun-ho, a knife-happy ex-special forces sergeant with a high rise-sized grudge.