We just had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s giddy, nasty, devilishly fun spin on Capcom’s popular zombie franchise. It gave us renewed hope (after Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Fallout) that video game adaptations could be good, actually. But now here comes Street Fighter, a garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it, crushing those hopes in its atomic suplex.
Fans certainly won’t mind. They’ve kept the box office’s life bar in the green for these one-on-one fighter adaptations going all the way back to the disastrous 1994 Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and his $10,000-a-week coke problem. They’ll happily tolerate how the new Street Fighter, like those Mortal Kombat movies, can barely string together a cohesive plot, which has clearly been pencilled in as an afterthought between rounds of combat in yet another tournament-style narrative.
None of that will matter because they’re just here for the dopamine hits by way of nostalgia. To that end, the movie exhaustively rolls out all the iconic characters and moves from the games – like Sumo warrior E Honda’s hundred-hand slap or military bro Guile’s flash kick – not to mention some at-times striking anime flashback sequences and a bevy of pop culture ephemera from its early-90s setting. Grainy, UHF quality MTV video segments show Ken (Noah Centineo) to be a self-destructive New Kids on the Block-era celebrity party boy with flashy blond curls, while the needle drops bring back bygone hits like MC Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit and Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It.
It’s all about keeping us pampered in those fond memories from our pubescent childhoods, including bits that bring back the way us preteen boys ogled the 16-bit version of hypersexualized Chun-Li. She’s played in the movie by the lively and commanding Callina Liang, who enters the frame thighs first and unfortunately plays the only character tasked with a gratuitous slow-motion shower scene. Liang doesn’t let that stuff drag down her performance, which is formidable, while her physicality during fight scenes is genuinely impressive.
She’s one of the handful who bring some modest pleasures to the overcrowded mess. WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes, wearing a cartoonish trapezoid blond wig as Guile, is genuinely funny in the way he barks pleasantries and threats in equal measure. Indian movie star Vidyut Jammwal, who is trained in the ancient martial art Kalaripayattu, brings captivating authenticity and hypnotic movements to his all-too-brief scenes as yoga priest Dhalsim.
Even controversial comic and manosphere podcaster Andrew Schulz gives a convincing performance worthy of an essay, playing Ken’s manager, who capitalizes on his bro’s brawn while coddling his wounded ego. But the likable performances get buried in a movie that often feels like it was made on a six-button control pad. Street Fighter is a barrage of character introductions and story arcs lifted from the games and animated spin-offs, colliding into one another in a way that makes a relatively linear plot (it’s a freakin’ fight tournament!) confusing.
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