Director Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter frequently depicts Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) as an oaf, but he can actually fight. He’s a little like the film itself in that way: the editing choices, scene transitions, and even the basic plot are frequently baffling. And yet, it can throw a punch when it wants to. Its fight scenes are, for the most part, well-choreographed and well-shot. Its 2D animation sequences, cleverly used to separate the scenes set in the past from the ones set in the present, are gorgeously brought to life by Titmouse. That makes it all the more frustrating, then, when Street Fighter chooses to spend its time doing the equivalent of Ken fighting a polar bear, reducing its potential to a poorly planned gimmick.
When Street Fighter opens (with one of those excellent animated sequences), it’s 1987, and Ryu (Andrew Koji) is fighting in the first World Warrior Tournament. He wins, but things go sideways for him pretty quickly after that. His master, Gouken (Don Lee), is murdered, and by the time 1993 rolls around, he’s disappeared from public life and he hasn’t spoken to Ken, with whom he formed a brotherly bond when they trained under Gouken together, for six years.
Far from retreating from the spotlight, Ken has embraced it. In 1993, he’s all over MTV, a major celebrity, but a joke, reduced to participating in stunt fights with cars and exotic animals (or, at least, men dressed up as exotic animals). So when Chun-Li (Callina Liang) comes around, inviting him to participate in the second World Warrior Tournament, hosted by M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), Ken thinks this might just be the thing that makes the world see him as a serious fighter again. He’s very much not looking forward to dealing with Ryu, though, who, despite some initial reluctance, also ends up in the tournament.
All of this works just fine. The movie, to this point, is stylish, referential, and campy, clearly enjoying and respecting its source material while doing just enough to string together a basic but perfectly competent plot. It’s not taking itself too seriously, and that’s a good thing. This is the part where Street Fighter is everything you hoped it would be, and everything the trailers made it look like it could be.
Once the film moves to the second World Warrior Tournament, though, that basic but perfectly competent plot explodes, devolving into far too many side stories that frequently go nowhere or are dropped altogether. There’s an entire 10-minute sequence in the middle of the film that seems to serve no narrative purpose. Many scenes don’t connect to the previous ones, making for head-scratching transitions; there are a lot of shots that seem to be missing because they would’ve been too expensive to execute.
The editing, too, goes fully off the rails, with one sequence presented out of order for no explicable reason. It’s much more confusing the way it’s actually shown than it would’ve been if they had just played it straight through. And we see frustratingly little of the tournament, as much of it happens off-screen.
Perhaps the most egregious crime that Street Fighter commits is that it is so blatantly designed to set up a sequel that it feels like half a movie. There are major conflicts that are left unresolved. And that wouldn’t even be so bad if Street Fighter‘s themes—what few there are—were satisfyingly tied up, but they’re not. There is both too much and too little in this movie, and it can’t seem to figure out what story it’s trying to tell.
And yet, for all its faults, its easy to see how Street Fighter could’ve been the movie we all wanted it to be. The tone, for the most part, works, even though the jokes don’t always land. The creative team clearly has a real affection for Capcom’s games; there are some genuinely cool Easter eggs that somehow don’t feel like they’re trying too hard, which is a real feat. And even through all the bizarre choices, Street Fighter seems to have the bones of the big, fun action movie with a forgettable plot that it should have been.
We all know that the plot, in a movie like this, is not the point. The best thing it can do is get out of the way and allow us to get lost in the spectacle. But that’s exactly where Street Fighter stumbles, distracting from the action with incoherent storytelling and shoddy editing. Street Fighter gets points for style, but not much else.
Street Fighter opens in theaters on October 16.
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