Yang Li’s time-travel action-comedy Escape From the 21st Century is overstuffed with ideas. Some of them are big, weighty ideas, about human potential, regret, lost time, and the meaning of life. Some of them are much, much sillier, like the idea that playing enough Street Fighter 2 gives you superpowers.
The movie is a frantic adventure centering on three awkward teenage boys who get exposed to a chemical spill in 1999. Afterward, whenever they sneeze, they either jump forward in time to inhabit their own adult bodies 20 years in the future, or back to their present. The time-jumping reveals that the far future of 2019 is a dark, ugly world, where they’re at odds with each other and with a seemingly unstoppable, cartoonishly powerful force — an old friend who’s turned a borrowed Street Fighter 2 game cartridge into a world-changing weapon.
In this short clip from the movie, the three teenagers — Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun), Chengyong (Song Yang), and Pao Pao (Leon Lee) — go up against that friend, Han Guang, who’s capable of kicking opponents clear off the screen with a single attack. His Street Fighter 2-derived fighting skills are typical for the movie, which takes a chaotic, goofy approach to combat that’s half Everything Everywhere All At Once, half Kung-Fu Hustle. Yang Li, the film’s writer-director, is openly working in the mode of Stephen Chow, the director and star of Kung-Fu Hustle, The Mermaid, Shaolin Soccer, and other over-the-top action-comedies: Escape From the 21st Century is wild and manic, rushing from one combat to the next, and from the past to the 2019 “future” and back again, with giddy verve.
But the idea of playing a Street Fighter game long enough to transfer its lessons into real-world skills winds up being one of the movie’s goofiest and most visually inventive ideas. It’s a way to turn the whole movie into a giant joke outsized action-adventure that feels like a much less bloody riff on the recent game parody Boy Kills World.
