Street Fighter

The new movie Street Fighter clearly aims to capitalize on the nostalgia of fans around the world who have made this video-game franchise a smash for nearly four decades. As someone who has never played Street Fighter, the movie made me nostalgic for five months ago, when Mortal Kombat 2 proved that a video-game adaptation could be entertainingly silly while still taking its characters, its world, and — most importantly — its action seriously.

Street Fighter, however, is a little bit of everything that amounts to a lot of not-much. It’s a film that can’t quite land on a tone, nor does it explain its world and its premise in a way that will make sense to newcomers to the IP. All of that would be forgivable if the martial-arts sequences delivered, if the thrill of inventive choreography and camerawork let the stunt performers shine, but after a few exuberant fights early on, the rest find themselves lost in an over-edited sludge of low-wattage sameness.

An animated flashback opens the action at a tournament in 1987, where Ryu (Andrew Koji, Bullet Train) is fighting to be world champion. (Anachronism alert: he gets pumped up for the match by listening to a song that won’t be recorded until 1992.) Despite the warnings from his sensei, Ryu wins the battle by tapping into his inner darkness, his eyes glowing red while a far-off entity goads Ryu into embracing his shadow self. After the victory, Ryu is horrified at what he could become, and he abandons fighting altogether.

In 1993, flamboyantly fascistic M. Bison (David Dasmalchian) wants to steal Ryu’s dark power for himself, so he announces a new tournament to bring Ryu out of the woodwork. Bison sends Chun-Li (Callina Liang, Presence) to gather the world’s greatest fighters, including tall Russian bruiser Zangief (Olivier Richters, Reacher), masked claw fighter Vega (musician Orville Peck), boxer Balrog (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), battling monk Dhalsim (Indian superstar Vidyut Jammwai), and wedge-haired American Guile (wrestler Cody Rhodes). Oh, and also Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), Ryu’s one-time best friend and fellow student; they haven’t spoken in years, and over time, Ken has become a shameless glory hog and professional pitchman, a powerful fighter who’s also a joke.

And then, they all fight. Centineo and Rhodes deliver wisecracks, while Dasmalchian, Kyle Mooney (as a nerdy INTERPOL agent), and Eric André (as a constantly-yelling sports announcer) shoot for the highest of high camp. That would all be well and good, were it not for the fact that we’re meant to take so much of this seriously. Ryu’s inner struggle and turmoil, not to mention Chun-Li’s quest for vengeance against her father’s killer, are deadly earnest affairs, their disparate weightiness unbalancing everything else.

Director Kitao Sakurai (Bad Trip) comes from the world of comedy (he was one of the developers of Adult Swim’s The Eric André Show), but here he never succeeds in juggling the broad variety of tones that the script has tasked his ensemble to enact. Nor does he demonstrate any particular acumen for directing action. The two most memorable fights arrive courtesy of tongue-in-cheek absurdity: Ken attacks Ryu in a hotel room, with Ryu inflicting pain on his old friend purely through defense and deflection, and in another Ryu fights a much larger opponent in a steam bath, where both are clad only in towels. Those both take place early in Street Fighter, eventually giving way to a series of look-alike scenes, dimly-lit, where dozens of adversaries clash in unmemorable bouts.

Notably, and in the absence of anything else, the camera of cinematographer Ken Sang (They Cloned Tyrone) is equal-opportunity in its leering: the Dolls (Bison’s henchwomen), clad in uniforms that fall somewhere between “cadet” and “flight attendant,” get full up-and-down pans over their tight pencil skirts, but the male fighters’ physiques are also subject to that same gaze. This sort of bake-shop objectification will matter to someone.

This year’s Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat 2 proved that, after many failed attempts and fan-service sequels, video-game adaptations can be given new life on the big screen, mixing thrills, action, humor, and self-awareness. Street Fighter assembles those elements but never lands on a formula that functions.

Director: Kitao Sakurai
Screenwriter: Kitao Sakurai and T.J. Fixman; story by Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman, based on the CAPCOM video game
Cast: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Calina Liang, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai, David Dasmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Andrew Schulz, Eric André, Vidyut Jammwal, Orville Peck, Olivier Richters, Hirooki Goto, Rayna Vallandingham, Alexander Volkanovski, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Jason Momoa
Executive producers: JJ Hook, Jay Ashenfelter, Kenzo Tsujimoto, Haruhiro Tsujimoto
Producers: Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Jason Momoa, Takayuki Nakayama, Stefan Makhoul
Director of photography: Ken Seng
Production design: Kevin Kavanagh
Editing: James Thomas, Delaney Del Vecchio
Music: Leo Birenberg, Zach Robinson
Sound design: Scott Martin Gershin, supervising sound editor: sound designer
Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Legendary Pictures, CAPCOM
In English
119 minutes