The first thing that can be said is that this new Street Fighter is a lot better than the previous attempts to bring the legendary Capcom video game to life on the big screen. That’s not really an accomplishment, of course, because it wouldn’t take much effort to be better than either of those movies (an effort in 1994 with the same name and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, a reboot/spin-off that sought to launch a cinematic universe in 2009). After all, those movies ranged from frankly embarrassing to stultifyingly dull.
Setting aside direct comparisons, well, the only real emotion that is stirred by this new movie is a realization that direct comparisons are kind of the only way to go. The film features many more characters than did the ’94 film and, wisely, sidelines the human cartoon that was at the center of it (one might recall—be haunted by, in fact—Jean-Claude Van Damme performing the all-American role of Guile by mostly leaning on his Belgian dialect). Then again, it does saddle some characters with the kind of generic backstory that was given to the Chun-Li character in the ’09 film—though, thankfully, without the crass misogyny that was weirdly pervasive throughout it.
Setting aside direct comparisons for real this time, we must now obviously consider the new movie on its own terms, and thankfully, that’s a little easier to do, given that it’s more mediocre than outright terrible and far more forgettable than flagrantly insulting to the intelligence. In other words, it’s still not very good, but at least it’s not too bad. There are some ideas and elements with promise here, although screenwriters Kitao Sakurai (who also directed) and T.J. Fixman certainly do not come close to doing anything of genuine interest with them.
One will almost certainly recall (because the series is still popular and, by now, baked into the popular culture in ways that are difficult to quantify) that the games pretty much boiled down to a series of fights between playable characters of various power levels. These did not overlap in any comprehensible way, but of course, that didn’t really matter in the thick of a fight. The games were enjoyable vessels for wasting time while avoiding the necessity of doing something else more productive.
The plot here has been concentrated around two of the eventual street-fighters—Ken (Noah Centineo) and Ryu (Andrew Koji), who grew up as adoptive brothers under the care of a martial arts grandmaster named Kouken (voice of Don Lee). We find out in an animated opening and a later interlude that Kouken was betrayed by somebody close to him and the boys, and so, obviously, everything will eventually lead to a fight that’s more personal than any of the other ones, which function as levels to get us there. There are even more animated interludes, by the way, and while they are cleverly hand-drawn in the style of anime, they’re also just here to provide exposition and contribute to whatever actual sincerity exists between the quipping and the fighting.
Other characters show up, too, including the no-nonsense Chun-Li (Callina Liang), the alpha-male Guile (this time played by a stilted Cody Rhodes), the stretchable Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal), a pair of comedians (Andrew Schulz and Eric André) as Ken’s handler and the tournament’s ringmaster respectively, and a few others, and the name of the game is to get a few jokes or moments of action from each and eject them from the proceedings. Sometimes, there’s a neat idea that pays off (David Dastmalchian’s M. Bison, who is otherwise useless to the narrative, gets to have his spinning-missile-attack moment, and the famously masked Orville Peck nearly becomes unmasked as the claw-wielding Vega), but then again, the movie has the audacity to cast Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as the boxer Balrog and do precisely nothing else with that uncanny resemblance. The less said about a big, green, laughably digital version of Jason Momoa when he shows up (and loses a fight) as Blanka, the better.
The plot has Ken and Ryu having to face the legacy of their shared traumatic past before joining forces in that fateful fight, which could not be more anticlimactic if it tried. Street Fighter is all about the power of friendship, but it’s really all about the power behind a big purple ball of an energy blast.
Rating: ** (out of ****)
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