My parents were in a bowling league when I was a kid, which meant I spent an awful lot of Sunday evenings at the local alley, usually planted in front of the Street Fighter II cabinet and burning through quarters. When the game finally came to the Super Nintendo, my friends and I rented it from the mom-and-pop video store in town — the same shop where I would work evenings and weekends during my teenage years — and spent the weekend poring over Nintendo Power, trying to work out how to pull off the special moves (it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that you needed to roll your thumb along the directional pad for many of the inputs). Ryu was my go-to then and remains so today, even if my reflexes aren’t what they used to be and my time in front of fighting games is much more sporadic, but it’s probably still fair to say I’m the sort of person Paramount hoped to reach with Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter. It’s the franchise’s third trip to live action, after Steven E. de Souza’s 1994 film (which sucks, has always sucked and will always suck, Raul Julia’s gleefully deranged Bison aside) and 2009’s forgettable The Legend of Chun-Li.
It also arrives at an interesting moment for video game adaptations. The Minecraft Movie and the Super Mario films have made crazy money, quality notwithstanding. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil took a genuinely novel approach: instead of retelling a particular story from the games, it set out to evoke the feeling of actually playing one, which I think virtually no adaptation has attempted, let alone succeeded at. Sakurai heads in the opposite direction: his film is almost slavishly devoted to the character designs and the franchise’s absurd lore, and while that devotion may thrill the most die-hard fans, I’m not convinced it will matter much to anyone else.
The story, such as it is, reunites estranged training partners Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) six years after a tragedy split them apart. Interpol agent Chun-Li (Callina Liang) recruits both men for a tournament hosted by villainous dictator M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), who obviously has bigger plans than crowning a champion: he’s kidnapping fighters and hooking them up to a machine with a giant label that reads “psycho power” and presumably draining them of their life force. I say “presumably” because the film never bothers to actually explain what psycho power is, where it comes from, or why Bison wants it; the storytelling has roughly the intellectual depth of a teaspoon. That might be easier to forgive if the film could decide what it wants to be, but it careens so wildly from one tone to the next that each scene seems shot by a different director and cut by a different editor; earnest melodrama about brotherhood sits right next to gags about foot fetishes. Very few of the jokes land, and much of the oversexualized humor comes across as creepy and gross (Kyle Mooney, as a fellow Interpol agent obsessed in more ways than one with Chun-Li’s physical prowess, is especially troubling).
You might expect, for a film called Street Fighter, that the actual fights would do a lot of the heavy lifting, but unfortunately that isn’t the case here. They’re all over the goddamn place, hampered by camera placement and editing that often obscure whatever choreography might be happening. Perhaps this is a stylistic choice, because as it turns out, most of the signature moves from the games look incredibly stupid when performed by actual human beings. Ryu’s Tatsumaki Senpukyaku (the hurricane kick, for the uninitiated) is probably the most ridiculous, and I say that as someone who has thrown it literally hundreds of times with a controller in hand. It’s strange that the recent Mortal Kombat films managed this kind of translation while Street Fighter fails so miserably.
The casting is as scattershot as everything else. WWE star Cody Rhodes, sporting Guile’s signature flattop and American flag tattoo, is responsible for some of the only laughs I actually enjoyed, but the biggest surprise is Roman Reigns (Rhodes’ WWE rostermate), who acquits himself quite well as Akuma and brings a menace the film’s actual villain never musters. That’s largely because Dastmalchian is woefully miscast as Bison, and his best moment is borrowed: a riff on Raul Julia’s most famous line as the character. Comedian Andrew Schulz is similarly out of place as Ken’s manager, Dan Hibiki, and Eric André, who worked with Sakurai on The Eric Andre Show and shows up here as a television personality/master of ceremonies, is positively grating while being granted more screentime than half of the fighters. Liang does what she can with an underwritten role more interested in her character’s physical assets than in the revenge story that’s supposed to drive her. Centineo isn’t terrible, though he’s a bit too over the top in places, and his himbo take on Ken never quite convinces. Koji, meanwhile, is easily the most compelling thing in the movie, with a performance that suggests he’s the only person on set who thinks the brotherhood story is worth taking seriously.
The film’s saving grace is its 2D anime flashbacks, all of which are superb. The more fantastical elements of the Street Fighter universe have always worked better in animation (if you don’t believe me, check out 1994’s Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which still holds up pretty well). These sequences are so fucking good that I spent much of the runtime wishing Sakurai had just taken this approach for the entire film. It almost certainly would have been better than this mess.
The film ends by refusing to deliver the showdown it’s been building toward for the entire two-hour running time, opting instead to tee up a sequel, which is a bold move for a movie I can’t imagine doing enough business to warrant one. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to recommend anyone catch Street Fighter on the big screen at all. If you grew up with these games and these characters the way I did, I think there’s an argument for getting a few friends together in someone’s living room to watch it once it’s available to stream, then breaking out a console afterward to go a few rounds with the classics. I suspect you’ll have a lot more fun with the second half of that evening.