From the moment Legendary Pictures and Capcom revealed its new live-action Street Fighter, there was a ceiling placed above it. This movie could either be so bad it’s good or so bad it’s just bad. There wasn’t a third option, at least, that’s what I thought for around a year. It turns out, there is a third option: it’s both.
Street Fighter is basically two movies in one: It is one half the aforementioned “so bad it’s good” flick, running into walls hard enough to break through them as it shatters the shackles of a faithful adaptation and becomes an incomprehensible parody of Capcom’s fighting games. Also equally present is the “so bad it’s bad” film that is baffling from both a filmmaking and storytelling perspective. Both of these movies are connected by fights that are fun to watch and disconnected by ones it refuses to show. The strained threads that manage to hold it all together are a constant barrage of bits of varying quality that every actor commits to with such tenacity that it all somehow turns around to being brilliant?
To be clear: Street Fighter’s a bad movie. It’s incoherent, edited in ways that don’t make any sense, and the gap between its best performances and worst ones is wider than the skill difference between a mediocre player picking up Street Fighter for the first time and the all-time great Daigo Umehara. Also, the way it treats the few women on the roster, performing character assassination on Cammy by essentially turning her from a stoic, duty-driven Doll into a crazed Juri stand-in and injecting some truly out-of-pocket horniness into Chun-Li’s scenes at the expense of their gravity, sucks ass. But after watching Street Fighter, my friends and I sat together for hours untangling this messy hairball of a movie, and the more we did so, the more we started to see the vision. Half the vision is just kind of garbage.
Though the massive ensemble cast brings so many of the biggest names in Street FIghter back to the big screen, the movie is primarily a Ken and Ryu story, cranking up their history as friendly rivals into one of deep-rooted jealousy and resentment. After years apart, the two are reunited at the World Warrior tournament, which is just a front for the psycho-powered tyrant M. Bison’s plans to siphon Ryu’s growing powers into himself. Amidst all this, Chun-Li is undercover as a double agent working for Bison but operating with her own agenda, and a whole lot of other Street Fighter mainstays show up in-between the serious shit, and while they’re mostly relegated to bit players, by golly, they are effective. Cody Rhodes as Guile is a certified scene stealer and Jason Momoa’s Blanka is an actual good example of what happens when an actor has truly stopped giving a shit (complimentary), in stark contrast to his role in Minecraft.
The cast’s ability to deliver rapid-fire nonsense with a straight face is what elevates Street Fighter beyond straight camp and into a sometimes-hilarious martial arts comedy, in between the many, many jokes that don’t land. For every good gag, you get something tired and extremely dated that feels straight out of a movie from its ‘90s setting that lands with a groan-inducing thud. Then it somehow balances the gay jokes out by being extremely homoerotic any chance it gets. Again, Street Fighter is multiple movies in one, coalescing into a trainwreck that erupts in a magnificent explosion of fire and chaotic destruction. Almost nothing it does is in service to anything beyond the bit. The movie cannot resist submerging everything in a thick, self-aware irony, whether it’s the writing or its music choices straight out of a Gen X or elder Millennial’s nostalgia playlist.
This steadfast unwillingness to take anything seriously extends to even the most serious characters in the series becoming spoofs of themselves. M. Bison? The despot trying to suck the superpowered life force out of Ryu? Street Fighter makes a whole thing out of him probably having a foot fetish, and there is more than one shot of actor David Dastmalchian’s eyes rolling back into his head like he’s mid-climax. Also, there are a surprising amount of dudes cumming in this movie. It happens more than once.
A movie this dumb and batshit feels like something that should be immune to meaningful dissection because almost none of it is meaningful. It is the movie equivalent of a group of sleep-deprived fighting game players riffing on their collective vocal stims in a voice chat. But even under those pretenses, Street Fighter is just an oddly constructed film. It’s so bloated in its two-hour runtime that it is constantly flashing back and forth between multiple plot threads in one scene, regardless of if they’re connected at all. The editing of some segments, such as one in which the movie obscures the middle section of a conversation between Ken and Chun-Li only to splice what we missed into the very next segment for no real benefit, confounds me. And, perhaps most notably, the larger cast is exceptionally underutilized. When the actual tournament began and it was revealed that Guile and Vega had it out off-screen, I realized that we were going to miss out on a lot of actual street fighting in the Street Fighter movie.
The fights we do get are choreographed well and even I am not immune to the key-jingling of watching the actors pull off their characters’ signature moves, but some characters like Zangief and Guile only get to have it out in a group bar fight rather than in the ring. There are a lot of fighters in this movie, but we only see a handful of them really partake in the scrap. As a Ryu main, I got to see my boy toss a few fireballs, but if you’re hoping every character gets some big fight where they get to cycle through all your favorite moves, you’re gonna be disappointed.
A lesser movie would have nothing but a mess to show for all this spectacle, but Street Fighter’s tireless devotion to the bit somehow manages to salvage everything that makes it terrible into an incredible group watch. It’s hard to communicate the way this movie straddles the line between good and bad without sounding like you’re just describing how every other bad fighting game adaptation does it. But unlike something like the Dead or Alive movie or the modern Mortal Kombat, the group watch isn’t so you can all make fun of Street Fighter; it’s so you can all sit around after and realize that the movie has just as much sauce as it does horseshit.