Street Fighter comes at your eyeballs like a crazy farm bro offering duck doo-doo for Visine.
If it proves anything, it’s that humans can still do brain rot slop better than AI. That’s its aesthetic. Yet it has a beating heart that feels mostly real. Somehow, beneath all the ridiculousness, there’s something inside its plastic sheen that kept me interested. Even when the movie starts losing its grip on whatever the heck it’s trying to do beyond being a live-action cartoon.
I loved the opening anime prologue, and almost wish the whole movie was done in this style. It immediately establishes an over-the-top energy that suits Street Fighter perfectly. The first half is promising enough, too. Out of the gate, it feels like the love child of Michael Bay and Paul Verhoeven. A pretty appealing combination if you’re in the mood for something this gloriously stupid.
Like Ken Masters himself, it’s handsome but dumb as rocks.
I was all in. The movie understands that subtlety isn’t the mission. It had the opportunity to embrace the absurdity of its source material and turn the whole thing into a gloriously unhinged spectacle. For a while, that’s exactly what it felt like I was getting. Then somewhere around the midsection, it starts to sag, before totally losing the plot. If it even had one to begin with.
The problem is that the movie starts to feel like it’s running on fumes before it gets around to delivering the payoff we’ve been waiting for. The energy that made the opening so much fun gradually gives way to a story that doesn’t seem to know where it’s going. I was happy to hop on this podunk county fair ride, but eventually, I wanted the ride to actually take me someplace. Not just toss me into the bushes like a used tissue.
What I hate the most is that it gives us another non-ending. Full-on pulling another Across the Spider-Verse, with no real indication that we’ll ever see a sequel. Its big “to be continued” moment is like a punch in the face from Ryu himself.
I expected a big showdown with Bison, but it never comes. The movie just ends. Like Hope did recently. A total ripoff. Give me an ending, movie. Don’t just leave this farm bro dangling in the wind. It’s done so abruptly, I felt like I’d been mugged at gunpoint.
It’s especially frustrating because a proper showdown feels like the kind of thing this movie should be building toward. You can throw all the ridiculous nonsense at me you want, but I still want the story to deliver on its promises. When the credits arrived without the confrontation I’d been anticipating, it doesn’t feel like an exciting cliffhanger so much as the movie just stopped. Like the film broke. I can still hear it flapping on the side of the projector.
Another thing I don’t like about this movie is that it’s filled with every actor that currently makes me groan out loud. David Dastmalchian, ugh. Eric André, come on. Kyle Mooney, dang it. Andrew Schulz, what the heck are you even doing here? Just annoying people. I don’t hate them, I actually like most of them. But not here, in my video game movie. They make me feel the same way Whoopi Goldberg does when she shows up somewhere unnecessary, like in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Modern groaners. And yes, I mentioned André in the bunch. Go ahead and revoke my lifelong membership card to Patton’s Satanic Army. After this? I don’t care. I think he delivers the worst performance in the whole flick. As it stands today? I’m totally Team Chet.
That’s obviously a personal reaction, and your mileage may vary depending on how you feel about this particular collection of performers. For me, though, their presence often works against the experience. I can appreciate that a movie like Street Fighter is going for a heightened, almost cartoonish atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean every casting choice is going to work for me. Sometimes a face shows up onscreen and all I can think is, oh, here we go again with more absolute donkey poo-doo.
I did like the soundtrack. It has some well-placed needle drops. Especially The Offspring musical number toward the end. But I have to ask, why is the song ‘Keep ‘Em Separated‘ edited like that? The fight scenes are mostly fun, and those moments help remind you why the movie seemed so promising in the first place. There’s an appealing sense of spectacle here, even if the whole thing just kind of loses its way down the gak-bricked road.
Perhaps it should have been 80 minutes instead of a whole 120 of them. There’s a tighter, more satisfying version of this movie hiding somewhere inside the one we got. The opening had me ready to embrace the madness, but the longer it went on, the more I started wishing somebody had stepped in with a sharper pair of katanas.
This comes on as the perfect companion film for this year’s earlier He-Man and the Masters of the Universe live-action reboot. Which is a little ironic, as Ken Masters actor Noah Centineo was supposed to play Prince Adam. He certainly has the body for it. But he’s starting to look a bit too old for the role. I understand why they went with someone else.
Both make for an interesting kind of modern franchise double feature for old dudes from the ’90s, but Street Fighter left me with the more frustrating experience of watching a movie that initially had me completely on board before losing me along the way.
I started off really digging what this was selling. But like a can of Rockstar, the buzz wore off before I could finish the can and it left me with a sweet tooth stomach ache. It’s grandpa sh*t.
