Street Fighter Review: Even David Dastmalchian Can't Save This Incoherent Action Movie

Not even Ryu can Hadouken his way out of this one

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

Street Fighter opens with an anime-style flashback, one of several stunning sequences throughout the film animated by Titmouse (The Venture Bros, Big Mouth, The Legend of Vox Machina). At a legendary fighting tournament in Thailand, series protagonist Ryu (Andrew Koji) goes too far, letting his rage fuel a devastating series of blows, while his adoptive brother Ken (Noah Centineo) watches in horror from the sidelines. We then jump a few years forward to the early '90s. Ryu has gone into hiding, while Ken sold out his own fighting tournament success to become a washed-up celebrity. But 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. Sure, there are lots of jokes and visual gags, and a lot of the character design is downright campy (Cody Rhodes as Guile with his towering, bleach-blonde flattop is a marvel to behold). But the core story of Ken and Ryu is ultimately played as a drama, not a comedy.

Centering the story on Ken, the game's eternal "Player 2" character (the Luigi of fighting games to Ryu's Mario), and then exploring his deep-seated insecurities, is actually a pretty clever move, but Sakurai doesn't give that story enough time to marinate in between all the fight scenes. When Ken and Ryu finally do have their heart-to-heart, it comes across as flat and unearned.

The third lead here 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's going up Dastmalchian’s zany energy. It's almost like they've been spliced together from two different movies.

Much of Street Fighter feels that way, and it's clear the film needed a lot of editing to feel even semi-coherent. There are countless moments throughout where the camera suddenly cuts to a close-up of one character or another simply shouting or shrieking at the screen to emphasize a scene that would have otherwise felt incomplete. The camera also regularly cuts to extras seemingly given little direction beyond, "Act like a background NPC 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 aren't half bad. The combat feels visceral and heavy: titans clobbering each other in a glorious arena where each blow sends blood and concrete flying in every direction. But 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 your opponent mid-air, and iconic Hadouken energy blasts. We get some of that across this movie, but for the most part, it's pretty generic punching and kicking. A Street Fighter movie fight scene should feel like watching two professional players duke it out at the highest level, not a match against your little cousin who just keeps spamming the punch buttons.

In the end, however, Street Fighter's biggest sin is simply wasting our time. Despite a brutal 2-hour runtime that easily could have been cut down to 90 minutes or less, the movie doesn't even manage to reach a satisfying conclusion. Instead, it just goes and goes and goes until suddenly, in the middle of an important scene, it's over. 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. (It's as if Marvel had launched its cinematic universe with Avengers: Infinity War with no guarantee we'd ever get Endgame.)

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

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Street Fighter releases in theaters on Oct. 16.