Lots of fights and campy humor, not enough development.
The movie opens and has flashbacks and a mid credit scene in the style of anime. And it all looks and feels stylish, like maybe that’s what “Street Fighter” should have been. But the rest of it is live action.
This is the latest film adaptation of the Capcom video game, and the third one to say the least. And this is another one to have a lot of fights and campiness, but not enough development. Some of us aren’t too familiar with the characters or story, except for the fact that they do a lot of fighting. Maybe that will win video game fans over, but not me.
We meet Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) and Ryu (Andrew Koji), two young fighters and adoptive brothers in the late 80s, who have gone their separate ways after the death of their master. Now, the 90s has Ken Masters as a celebrity, but more in the vein of Arthur Bach being an MTV boy, while Ryu tries to sell his pigeon soup in the streets in order to avoid fighting and letting his inner demons take control of him. He’s like Jekyll and Hyde, but with inner emotions.
The villain of the movie is the dictator M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), who dresses like if Fearless Leader decided to go in red, and creates a tournament as part of his diabolical scheme. A young undercover agent named Chun-Li (Callina Liang) wants revenge on him for murdering her father so much, that she’s willing to get a hand branding that the doctors should look at. It’s almost in the same vein as someone getting a tattoo from a junkie. But anyway, that villain is the main reason why Ken and Ryu both have to reunite.
Among the cast, Jason Momoa (also credited as a producer) plays Blanka, a Hulk-like creature, whom Bison holds prisoner to fight Ryu. And he ends up being a good green guy, when he gives him a wake up call about whether or not the villain can help him find his lost mother. I think we can agree he was using him from the start.
We also have Eric Andre as a television host, who is imprisoned by Bison and forced to make the fighting announcements; Andrew Schulz as Ken’s fellow fighter and business manager Dan Hibiki; Cody Rhodes plays the former Air Force pilot Guile, whose flat blonde hair style is probably the reason why theaters are making popcorn buckets as it; and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson plays Balrog, the bad guy version of Mike Tyson.
The soundtrack for “Street Fighter” features 90s hits like 4 Non-Blondes’ “What’s Up” and The Offspring’s “Come Out and Play,” and it also likes to think that Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” was from that decade. These songs help with the fight sequences, especially since I was thinking back to how Bob Odenkirk fought in an arcade to the tune of “Come Out and Play.”
There are times when I smirked at the silly humor that pops in, and there’s a lot of it. But there are also times, when I couldn’t really read the supporting characters, and when I grew tired of the same old conflicts between Ken and Ryu. At the very least, they look fresher in the anime segments than in the live action parts.
I’m sure fans are salvaging to see this new version of “Street Fighter,” especially since they enjoyed the idiot hero of “Resident Evil” and the “Chicken Jockey” and “Water Bucket Release” of “A Minecraft Movie.” But I’m not a fan and I’ve never played the game, so it’s not really my style. And plus, I can listen to the songs somewhere else, and I still don’t recall hearing “Who Let the Dogs Out” when I was four years old.
