'Street Fighter' review: Noisy video game adaptation gets KO'd
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
From the most recent “Resident Evil” to HBO’s “The Last of Us,” we’ve experienced an almost unparalleled run of decent to remarkable video game adaptations after decades of crummy, uninspired sludge. Filmmakers have finally started to recognize that these properties can offer more than a recognizable title and a handful of Easter eggs, with some even managing to capture what made the source material so appealing in the first place. But what goes up must eventually come down, and “Street Fighter” is more than happy to drag us back to the days when video game movies were loud, obnoxious exercises in brand recognition. Director Kitao Sakurai’s riff on the popular Capcom arcade franchise throws a few good punches every now and again, but it’s so preoccupied with cramming in characters, indulging in nostalgia, and setting up future installments that it forgets to make the movie we’re currently watching worthwhile.
First released in 1987, “Street Fighter” has endured its share of cinematic punishment, most notably the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle from the nineties and the reviled late-aughts adaptation starring, uh, Chris Klein. The original game allowed players to assume the role of either Japanese martial artist Ryu or his American counterpart Ken Masters, though it was “Street Fighter II” that really opened the floodgates with its colorful assortment of international brawlers competing in a winner-take-all tournament. That sequel provides much of the inspiration for Sakurai’s film, which certainly looks the part, even if its understanding of what to do with these characters rarely extends beyond getting them into the same room.
For starters, “Street Fighter” doesn’t seem particularly interested in deciding who its protagonist is, which is odd considering Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji are playing Ken and Ryu, respectively. Their fractured friendship should provide a sturdy emotional foundation for the chaos surrounding them, but the film keeps tossing more characters into the mixing bowl until everyone is vying for attention and nobody has much of a personality beyond their costume. There’s Callina Liang’s Chun-Li, Jason Momoa going full CGI as the green-skinned, Hulk-adjacent Blanka, and WWE superstar Cody Rhodes flexing his chops as the flat-topped military man Guile, probably the standout supporting character of the bunch. And, oh, there’s Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as boxer Balrog, who naturally gets into a tussle accompanied by his own “Many Men (Wish Death),” despite the movie taking place in 1993, a full decade before the song was released. But do you think that would stop Sakurai from also finding a way to shoehorn Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?” into the festivities? Not a chance.
The film’s cavalier attitude toward its own period setting is admittedly part of the joke, but there’s a difference between embracing a ridiculous premise and treating every creative decision as an opportunity to wink at the audience. “Street Fighter” seems convinced that the mere recognition of a song, costume, or special move is enough to generate excitement, regardless of whether any of it makes sense within the story. It’s an approach that produces the occasional laugh but becomes increasingly exhausting as the film barrels forward.
One of the few genuinely inspired touches is the incorporation of hand-drawn anime sequences, including an opening that briefly suggests a more visually adventurous movie might be waiting around the corner. In fact, these interludes are so appealing that they make a persuasive case for animation being the better medium for this particular story. The backstory concerns the death of Ken and Ryu’s master, an event that fractures their once-formidable partnership before the film jumps ahead to 1993, when a new World Warrior Tournament is being organized under the watchful eye of the nefarious M. Bison (David Dastmalchian, hamming it up with considerable enthusiasm). Naturally, the tournament attracts a collection of eccentric fighters, all with their own motivations, allegiances, and grudges, though the screenplay struggles to give those competing interests much dramatic weight.
With its kitschy soundtrack, exaggerated character designs, and relentless appeals to nostalgia, “Street Fighter” is clearly aiming to recapture the goofy pleasures of an era when video game adaptations existed largely to parade familiar characters across the screen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, particularly for a property as gloriously silly as this one, but Sakurai rarely finds anything interesting to do with the material beyond assembling what amounts to an elaborate cosplay convention. Rhodes, to his credit, feels almost genetically engineered to play Guile, and his physical presence and deadpan delivery provide some welcome amusement. It’s just a shame that so many of the other performers are reduced to striking recognizable poses and waiting for their next opportunity to throw a punch.
To be fair, Sakurai knows how to stage a fight. Several of the combat sequences are tightly choreographed, appropriately brutal, and occasionally inventive in their use of the characters’ signature abilities. When the film stops worrying about its increasingly convoluted mythology and allows these larger-than-life personalities to beat the living hell out of one another, there’s some disposable fun to be had. The problem is that we can seldom understand why anybody is fighting in the first place. Ken Masters finds himself trading blows in a packed bar, for instance, with only the vaguest sense of what brought him there, and the movie treats the resulting spectacle as a substitute for narrative momentum. Eventually, the confrontations begin to blur together because there’s so little at stake beyond determining who gets to land the next elaborate combination.
The screenplay also saddles Chun-Li with an Interpol subplot involving her attempts to infiltrate Bison’s inner circle, introducing another layer of intrigue that might have worked had the film been willing to develop it. Instead, the competing storylines collide in a jumble of betrayals, revelations, and increasingly arbitrary confrontations, none of which receive enough attention to make their eventual payoffs satisfying. For a movie built around a tournament, there’s remarkably little sense of progression or anticipation. Characters simply arrive, fight, disappear, and reappear whenever the screenplay requires them, robbing the competition of the escalating tension that should make a premise like this so much fun.
Perhaps most irritating is the film’s insistence on treating its own conclusion as little more than an advertisement for the next installment. Rather than bring its various conflicts to a satisfying resolution, “Street Fighter” limps toward an anticlimax that seems more concerned with establishing where these characters might go next than giving audiences a reason to care about where they’ve been. It’s a remarkably optimistic strategy for a movie that has spent so much time struggling to justify its own existence.
There’s certainly room for a gloriously stupid “Street Fighter” movie, and I wouldn’t necessarily want one that takes itself too seriously. But stupidity works best when there’s some wit or imagination guiding the mayhem. Sakurai’s film has the costumes, the punches, and enough recognizable faces to keep longtime fans occupied, yet very little of the connective tissue needed to turn those ingredients into an entertaining movie. After years of video game adaptations finally figuring out how to level up, “Street Fighter” feels like somebody deliberately hit the reset button.
Grade: C-
STREET FIGHTER is now playing in theaters.
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