Spoilers follow for Street Fighter.
Put on your gis and gloves, fighting fans, because Street Fighter is now in theaters. The latest attempt to adapt the venerated fighting game franchise for the big screen may not be getting off to the best start with critics, but fans of the series will likely go check it out for themselves. The film does have its positive aspects, such as the gorgeous 2D animation used for flashback sequences as well as plenty of easter eggs and fighting moves ripped right from the classic games. But as a whole, Street Fighter is too slapdash to be a fully satisfying cinematic experience, and one of the biggest reasons why is that the film doesn’t use the seemingly obvious way to structure itself.
Street Fighter is a game about a fighting tournament, and while there is technically a tournament in the film, it isn’t the main focus. In fact, the movie goes out of its way to make the tournament feel like a largely incidental part of the plot, and this hurts the movie in more ways than one. What makes this even more bizarre is that this is a mistake that Mortal Kombat already made in the 2021 reboot, but the filmmakers behind Street Fighter didn’t learn the lesson from their fellow fighting franchise. How did this happen? Let’s take a look.
World of Warriors
Street Fighter may be the first movie in this new continuity, but it takes its cast and premise from the second game, Street Fighter II. This is a smart move, since not only is Street Fighter II the most famous game in the franchise, but the first entry is commonly considered to be a well-meaning prototype for a series that didn’t fully come together until the sequel. The movie doesn’t erase the first game though, instead incorporating the first World Warrior tournament and Ryu’s victory over Muay Thai master Sagat into the animated pre-title sequence to give us backstory for our main characters, Ryu and Ken Masters. The main plot picks up six years later when main villain M. Bison sets up a second World Warrior tournament in the hopes of enticing Ryu into the spotlight to defend his title so that Bison can steal Ryu’s Hado power — that’s the energy that powers his famous Hadoken move from the games.
The tournament draws in many notable fighters from around the world, and while you would think the tournament would take up a big chunk of the runtime, it really doesn’t. Bison puts up only a cursory front of interest in the tournament, immediately kidnapping Ryu and absconding to his lab to work on draining Ryu’s Hado power. Ken wants to become the champion to prove himself to his deceased master Gouken, but his efforts to win the tournament only make up about half of his story. Ryu doesn’t participate at all on account of being kidnapped before it starts, even though he goes through the trouble of defeating E. Honda ahead of time to take his spot in the roster. Nor does Chun-Li, who — egregiously for the film — was the only woman who competed in the game. While nearly every Street Fighter II character is present in some capacity, the film moves many of the major players to the margins of the actual tournament.
This results in a bewildering viewing experience where the tournament “begins” in the second act by jumping in after one of the fights is already over, with Guile having been eliminated off-screen by Vega. Some of the other fights are similarly skipped, and multiple rounds are decided by forfeit because a character is off doing something else for plot reasons. This makes the tournament such an afterthought that it becomes impossible to invest in the scenes that do take place during it, since it’s clear that the tournament is not a priority. It also means that we never see multiple fan favorite characters like Guile and Zangief in action aside from a pointless scene early on where a bunch of the contenders brawl in a nightclub. It’s disappointing not just because we don’t get enough fighting in our Street Fighter movie, but because the filmmakers should have known better when Mortal Kombat already suffered from this same narrative stumble.
Missing Kombat
I know it may seem like we’ve all lived several lives since the ancient times of 2021, but that was when the first of the Mortal Kombat reboot films was released. Although it did well enough financially to secure a sequel, the film was a mess on the creative side, feeling like one of the worst examples of focusing on all the wrong things when trying to launch a new franchise. Instead of an engaging story centered around beloved characters from the games participating in a fighting tournament starring champions from different realms, Mortal Kombat tried and failed to endear fans to series newcomer Cole Young and never actually featured the eponymous Mortal Kombat tournament. In fact, the villain Shang Tsung’s plan is to prevent the tournament from taking place by killing Earthrealm’s champions before it can happen. It’s a strange gambit that feels like it’s working backwards to do something different instead of just delivering on straightforward genre expectations.
Given how important the Mortal Kombat tournament is to the series mythology, the film couldn’t help but make me and many others feel like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: “You do plan on having Mortal Kombat in your Mortal Kombat movie, right?” It didn’t work, and much of the fan backlash to the reboot had to do with the movie excising the tournament and making unwelcome changes to MK lore, like the infamous “Arcana” tattoos that provided champions with special powers. It’s no surprise that the much more warmly received Mortal Kombat II not only jettisoned the Arcana concept and brought in series icons like Kitana and Johnny Cage, but also made the tournament the backbone of the story. Sure, the movie may not have set the world on fire, but it was a step in the right direction for a property that hasn’t had the best luck when it comes to adaptations.
So it's all the more baffling that Street Fighter falls into such a similar trap. It’s not like the movie sets the tournament aside to fill the runtime with something really interesting or subversive; it’s just thin characters and generic action scenes hastily assembled in a way that struggles to suggest any weight or gravitas. And it's not like Street Fighter has ever been Shakespeare (although Raul Julia certainly treated it as such in the 1994 film), but the games have enough iconic personalities and cultural pedigree that there’s no reason you can’t deliver a movie with entertaining action and a functional dramatic engine, especially when a conventional tournament provides the perfect built-in narrative structure of a sports movie building up to a climactic showdown. And for all the chatter about Bison’s plans to harness Psycho Power, we don’t see him go toe-to-toe with Ryu.
Instead, Street Fighter awkwardly jams in a battle between Ryu and Akuma as its climax while shuffling Bison, who has been the antagonist for most of the film, off to make a hasty getaway for a presumed sequel. And yes, Akuma is foreshadowed as Ryu’s rival via flashbacks, and it’s said beforehand he will challenge the winner of the tournament, but that rings a bit hollow when Ryu doesn’t actually win said tournament.
Back to Basics
Street Fighter feeling half-formed is especially disappointing because video game adaptations are having a major moment. Between the Sonic the Hedgehog films becoming smash hits, acclaimed shows based on Fallout and Castlevania, and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie garnering critical praise and the biggest box office take in the series’ history, the video game curse has most certainly been broken. Even Mortal Kombat has risen from the ashes with the aforementioned Mortal Kombat II being a solid and entertaining entry. Street Fighter had all the ingredients to continue the trend, but instead places fan references and sequel teases ahead of meat and potatoes storytelling. It all leads to a weird non-ending with the heroes in a car chasing after M. Bison, who has since recruited Sagat to his cause. This sequel setup would be much less frustrating if it felt like much of consequence happened in this movie.
I say this as someone with a lot of love for the offbeat fantasy lore of games like Soulcalibur and Mortal Kombat: Most people do not play fighting games for their world-building. They want to see their favorite characters in exciting 1v1 action, and the tournament conceit provides the most sensible framework to deliver that. That’s not to say you should skimp on trying to tell an actual story with the characters involved, but structurally, can we just start with the fundamentals? We’ll see if Street Fighter does well enough to warrant another round, but if it does, it would be better for everyone if the filmmakers remembered what made this franchise popular in the first place.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles, and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.