For a movie titled Street Fighter there's not a whole lot of fighting taking place on the streets. Presumably "Arena Fighter with side battles in a variety of indoor settings" was too much to fit on the poster. Then again, the title also doesn't mention the many, and often pretty funny, jokes scattered through this film. Guess they wanted to keep a few things a surprise.
There's a fair amount of backstory in this but pretty much all you need to know is that white guy party boy Ken (Noah Centineo, who brings some actual emotion to proceedings) and serious Asian with a grim past Ryu (Andrew Koji, who mostly just gets to look badass) were, despite their different backgrounds, raised as brothers by their martial arts teacher - only to have that bond shattered when their teacher was murdered by an evil spirit trying to get Ryu to unleash the dark power within him.
Actually, you don't even need to know that, because the real story is that Ryu won the World Warrior martial arts contest in 1987 while Ken was ordered to sit it out (his destiny was to protect Ryu... FROM HIMSELF) - all this is an animated prologue, by the way - then when Ryu didn't go all Super Saiyan to save their master Ken turned himself into a sellout joke while Ryu vanished.
Oh wait, the real real story is that the evil M Bison (David Dastmalchian), dictator of Shadaloo, is trying to extract some kind of energy he calls "psycho power" from top fighters and when the local chumps can't cut it he gets the idea of reviving the old World Warrior competition and luring the world's best fighters in so he can steal their energy. Will Ryu come out of retirement - which currently involves him selling soup so bad not even stray cats will drink it - to punch on, even if it means unleashing his dark power? Probably not... unless Ken does something stupid.
As you might have gathered, this doesn't take itself all that seriously and is a much better film for it. There's some pop culture jokes and some decent needle drops (despite being set in 1993, most of the soundtrack features songs recorded years later). But most of the film is a bunch of blowhards boasting about their skills before beating each other up. Which is exactly what you want (the fights are solid without being amazing), while Dastmalchian hams it up as Bison and Eric Andre chews the scenery as the fight announcer.
Some parts are slightly more serious: the subplot involving Chun-Li (Callina Liang) trying to take down Bison's scheme from within is largely played straight, though her liaison at Interpol (Kyle Mooney) is a bit of a cartoon sex pest because this also has a weirdly horny vibe running throughout (with so many half-naked musclebound people strutting around checking each other out, how could it not).
Of the rest of the fighters, Guile (Cody Rhodes), Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal), Balrog (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) and a near-unrecognisable Jason Momoa as Blanka are the highlights, but pretty much everyone hits the right tone (in a nice meta-joke, masked fighter Vega is played by masked singer Orville Peck). It's all various shades of bombast, but at least the good guys are in on the joke.
It's hard to wrap up a story that's just a bunch of fights and this doesn't even try, with a couple of explosions standing in for a conclusion before everyone hits the road heading towards Street Fighter II. Unless of course they decide to skip ahead and go straight to the 2023 virtual reality game Street Fighter VR Shadaloo Enhancement Plan.
- Anthony Morris
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