Cody Rhodes Stars in Incoherent Street Fighter Movie, Review Says

David Dastmalchian rolls his eyes back as he presses his thumbs into a sniveling scientist’s eye sockets. As the skull cracks and blood splatters across his forehead, he makes an expression that is best described as an orgasm face.

This happens within the first 10 minutes of Street Fighter, in which Dastmalchian plays the fighting game franchise’s chief antagonist, M. Bison. It is a perfect performance and a masterclass in B-movie camp. Unfortunately, nobody else in Street Fighter comes anywhere close to operating on Dastmalchian’s level. To make matters worse, writer-director Kitao Sakurai does not seem to know what kind of movie he is making, which leads to one of the sloppiest, cringiest, and most incoherent films of the year.

Street Fighter opens with an anime-style flashback, one of several striking sequences animated by Titmouse (known for The Venture Bros, Big Mouth, and The Legend of Vox Machina). At a legendary fighting tournament in Thailand, series protagonist Ryu, played by Andrew Koji, goes too far by letting his rage fuel a devastating series of blows. His adoptive brother Ken, played by Noah Centineo, watches in horror from the sidelines. The story then jumps a few years forward to the early 1990s. Ryu has gone into hiding, while Ken sold out his career as a tournament fighter to become a washed-up celebrity. When Bison announces a second fighting tournament, neither brother can resist competing, despite the fact that the entire competition is a very obvious trap.

The biggest problem with Street Fighter is that it wants to be a serious movie. There are plenty of jokes, visual gags, and campy character designs, such as Cody Rhodes as Guile sporting a towering, bleach-blonde flattop that is a marvel to behold. Even so, the core story of Ken and Ryu is ultimately played as a drama rather than a comedy.

Centering the story on Ken, the game’s eternal “Player 2” character, and exploring his deep-seated insecurities is a clever move. However, Sakurai does not give that story enough time to marinate between the fight scenes. When Ken and Ryu finally share a heart-to-heart, it comes across as flat and unearned.

The third lead is Callina Liang as Chun Li, an Interpol agent who infiltrates the tournament to take down Bison while endlessly showing off her rippling thigh muscles in skin-tight outfits. Liang delivers a dramatic performance that feels out of place when she goes up against Dastmalchian’s zany energy. It feels almost as though they were spliced together from two different movies.

Much of Street Fighter feels that way, and the film clearly needed heavy editing to feel even semi-coherent. Countless moments feature the camera suddenly cutting to a close-up of a character shouting or shrieking at the screen to emphasize a scene that would otherwise feel incomplete. The camera also regularly cuts to extras who appear to have received little direction beyond acting like background non-player characters in a fighting game.

Street Fighter sets up a sequel I hope we never see

Unlike the self-serious dialogue and uneven plotting, the fight scenes in Street Fighter are not half bad. The combat feels visceral and heavy, showing titans clobbering each other in a glorious arena where each blow sends blood and concrete flying in every direction. While the action is entertaining, it rarely lives up to the Street Fighter franchise, which is historically defined by epic finishing blows, unreal combos that juggle opponents mid-air, and iconic Hadouken energy blasts. The movie features some of those elements, but the combat mostly consists of generic punching and kicking. A movie fight scene based on this property should feel like watching two professional players duke it out at the highest level, rather than a match against a little cousin who just keeps spamming the punch buttons.

In the end, the biggest sin of Street Fighter is wasting our time. Despite a brutal two-hour runtime that easily could have been cut down to 90 minutes or less, the film fails to reach a satisfying conclusion. Instead, it just keeps going until it suddenly ends in the middle of an important scene. As the credits rolled, I turned to the friend sitting next to me, totally dumbfounded. Did the studio run out of money? Did Sakurai run out of ideas? In a desperate bid to keep audiences on the hook, an animated post-credits scene teases a sequel that may never happen, much like if Marvel had launched its cinematic universe with Avengers: Infinity War with no guarantee of ever getting Endgame.

I almost feel bad saying it, but I hope we never get a sequel to this Street Fighter movie. Sakurai gets a few things right, chief among them casting Dastmalchian as the main villain, but there is so much wrong here that the franchise already feels irredeemable. It is better to start fresh in a few years, or better yet, find another fighting game to adapt instead. Tekken is right there, folks.

Street Fighter releases in theaters on Oct. 16.

Source: Polygon