Would you believe me if I told you the best part of the new Street Fighter movie was the acting? Based on the previous outings of this series – not to mention its sibling franchise in the form of the consistently atrocious Mortal Kombat adaptations – that might be a tough sell, I know, but this latest reboot has assembled a cast eclectic and charismatic enough to power through the predictably appalling writing and story. This is old-school videogame-to-movie adapting, none of the prestige of The Last of Us or auteur power of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, and that’s most often for the worse, but this consistently fun ensemble makes Street Fighter hard to truly dislike.
Heading up this merry band – formed in part not by full-time actors but plenty of wrestlers, musicians, and comedians – is Noah Centineo as Ken Masters, the longtime co-lead of the game series, the goofy American counterpart to the more serious, more iconic Japanese Ryu (Andrew Koji). The year is, naturally, 1993, and Ken and Ryu, once brothers-in-arms, haven’t seen each other in years following an incident that left their master dead and Ryu lost in darkness. Now, though, they’ve both been invited to the second World Warrior fighting championship (Ryu won the first back in 1987), and so a collision course is set.
For Ken, who has gone from world-famous fighter to a washed-up MTV-hogging has-been, it’s a chance to re-prove himself, for Ryu it’s a chance to stop a demon from returning to the mortal plane, and for undercover cop Chun-Li (Callina Liang), it’s her last chance to bring superpowered crime boss M Bison (David Dastmalchian) to justice. Sound insane? It is – Street Fighter perfectly captures the feeling of playing a campaign mode in an actual fighting game, which is to say the story is complete gibberish in which the stakes change by orders of magnitude every few minutes and the wheres, hows, and whys of the fights never make sense.
One minute you might be in a barroom brawl between a giant Russian, a slinky gay Spaniard with claw gloves, and an American fighter pilot with hair in the shape of an aircraft carrier, the next you’re in prison as Ryu fights a hairy, Brazilian, electrified version of the Hulk. Nothing in this plot tracks or particularly matters – most of these scenes could happen in literally any order and it’d be about as coherent as the final product – and the writing is, naturally, well below par. The dialogue is blunt and crass and often straight up indecipherable due to a crummy sound mix; all told, it’s not exactly a winner of a script.
Miraculously, though, the cast manage to make something of this. Koji and Liang are a bit stuck behind taking their material too seriously, but Centineo finds a sweet spot, embracing the ridiculousness while also selling the depth of Ken and Ryu’s friendship and Ken’s hurt at how it fell apart. Meanwhile, Dastmalchian is a fittingly ludicrous villain, while wrestler Cody Rhodes is hugely likeable as Guile (the aforementioned American with the insane hair). Comedian Andrew Schultz is great as Ken’s friend and manager Dan, and 50 Cent, as boxer Balrog, basically gets to star in two music videos set to his own songs before skedaddling out of the story.
Director Kitao Sakurai (who replaced the Philippou brothers when they stepped away from this to make the polar opposite film in the form of the highly upsetting Bring Her Back) made his name working with Eric Andre, and you really feel that. Andre himself pops up and is an enjoyably funny presence, and a lot of the background characters are the sort of hyperviolent lunatics that Andre himself embodies in most of his own work. Sakurai’s fight scenes are very cartoon-y, which is unavoidable when making an action movie featuring fireballs and men who can stretch like Gumby, but they’re at their best when they’re actual cartoons. Street Fighter’s flashback sequences are all animated, and the anime-style action puts the live-action stuff to shame.
Street Fighter is not a *good* film. It’s also certainly not the movie to get a videogame sceptic to warm up on the genre – this is pure ‘90s-style boys-own entertainment that demands you go in familiar with the source material, is full of dick jokes, makes all the men impossibly ripped, and is more interested in its actresses’ asses than their faces. If that sounds off-putting to you, more than fair enough, but if you’re willing to let the Good Stupid just about outweigh the Bad Stupid, its sheer bloody-minded bro-out meatheadedness has its charms.
