Street Fighter

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Street Fighter is an adaptation of the Street Fighter video game series. In this feature, M. Bison hosts the second World Warrior Tournament as a scheme to capture Ryu and extract the power of the Hadou.

This is one of those insanely ridiculous movies; the sort of feature you find yourself laughing at far more than you're laughing with. This film just goes in a thousand different directions, and very rarely does it actually tie up a plot thread. In Street Fighter, there is a central story about two 'brothers': Ryu and Ken. Two fighters who trained under the same master in developing their skill with the Hadou, a fighting energy that holds the power to corrupt. We get whole streaks of their backstory delivered in beautiful, albeit quite jarring animation. The quality of design for the animation is so good it makes you wish that the entire film had been done in that medium. As it stands, we get this very personal arc for Ryu and Ken that often overrides anything else. A lot of it is highly predictable, and we're all left waiting for Ryu to inevitably be turned to the dark side and saved by Ken. However, there are so many times where their story needs to be pushed forward, and the film really struggles with how to do this. Pushing the prison break scene through and killing the fighting tournament storyline seemed quite lazy. Even the battle with Akuma later on felt like a lot of build-up for next to no return. Beyond loosely deciding to work together and believe in one another, the two leads don't really grow a whole bunch across the film either. The film putting everything on these two leads goes right with Noah Centineo; his work as Ken shows off his ability to belt quips and be charismatic. Andrew Koji, on the other hand, just seems quite boring; he isn't very expressive, and it's difficult to care about Ryu as a character.

I felt like there was a lot going on in the fringes of this film, which often made the whole thing play as overstuffed. The big focal point of this film was the fighting tournament, a setting where we barely got to see any action take place. The film is quite aware that it diminishes the tournament's importance, but you still feel cheated when you watch characters like Guile have their fight completely skipped over. There seems to be a bit of a push for characters from the games to have a spot at every turn, which just means there's a bit too much to look at and no one really gets good service out of it. There are a number of fighters who appear in the background and don't really add much to the film (50 Cent, Peck, Goto, Richters, and Volkanovski). There are also performers like Jason Momoa, Eric André and Kyle Mooney who just make complete unlikeable goofballs out of their roles; Momoa's childish Blanka is a particular low point. That's not to say all supporting characters were bad. I loved the rivalry and aggression Jarnson and Vallandingham brought to their characters. Andrew Schulz was absolutely hysterical here as Centineo's best friend and manager. 

This is a film that for the first hour is pretty self-aware of how crazy it is. There is a strong sense of playing into that. Jokes point at funny characters or circumstances and tease them out. There's a sense of levity that settles you in and gets you comfortable with a pretty zany world. This section of the film also has some brutal fight sequences with a very real sense of physical combat to them, although CGI swallows these sequences whole as the film progresses. I found villain stories in this to be where the film falls over in another way. Akuma, played by Joe Anoa'i, is not merely a bad performance but also just sort of happens without much effort to tell his story. The main antagonist feels like it should be Dastmalchian, who played M. Bison and has most of the villainous screen time. But as a character, Bison winds up being inconsistent and convoluted. Watching his eyelids flutter as pain and conflict happen around him is one thing, but the psychic floating that later turns into him fleeing out of the film entirely just fails to serve anything at all. This is particularly frustrating as Chun-Li, played by Callina Liang, is only really here to get revenge against that one villainous character. Her entire character often feels a little off to the side, doing her own thing but lacking the charisma to make that time her own.

This whole film is quite weirdly written and structured, with nothing ever really coming to much of a conclusion. You can have someone like Cody Rhodes comfortably play the funniest and best character in the film, oozing chemistry with performers like Jammwal. But then the film will just completely abandon him. Meanwhile, there's no cohesion in the main storyline, and the antagonist storylines create some really lousy, half-baked conflict. The fact that this film has the nerve to leave it all in the wind at the end is extremely disappointing. A movie like Street Fighter can tease a sequel, but there's no good reason to hang everything it has on a sequel without really bringing anything to a close. As a fighting film, it has the capacity to be cool, to get funky with the camera. But a lot of the time the camera caters to setting up a visual effect that often looks bad or half-finished. And if the camera isn't doing that, you can be sure it's taking in a woman's body like we're back to making early 2000s blockbusters. The soundtrack is chaos, with no real consistency here either. Although we'll always have Noah Centineo being beat up by 50 Cent as 'Many Men (Wish Death)' plays in slow motion.

There's never really going to be a good film adapted from a fighting video game, is there? I would give Street Fighter a 3.5/10.