‘Street Fighter’ Review: Noah Centineo Stars in a Video Game Adaptation That Pummels You With Fan Service and (Too Few) New Moves

The current trend of excavating video game nostalgia continues with this latest cinematic adaptation of the popular franchise that dates all the way back to 1987. Following in the footsteps of the successful 1994 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and the best-forgotten 2009 Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is Kitao Sakurai’s iteration, serving as a love letter to aging gamers. Featuring so many characters and elements from the games that non-aficionados are left desperately attempting to keep up, Street Fighter tries to thread the needle between fan service and welcoming the uninitiated. The result is that neither camp is likely to be fully satisfied.

There’s no doubting the passion of Sakurai and co-screenwriter T.J. Fixman, who approach the outlandish material with the sort of enthusiasm that suggests countless hours spent playing the games. But their fervor ironically winds up being counterproductive, yielding a jumbled tonal mess that feels deadly serious one moment and like parody the next. Even the film’s distinctive feature of using 2D anime-style sequences for its flashbacks proves problematic, since they’re so effective and vibrant that they wind up outshining the live action.

For me, a non-player reviewer for whom the preceding films are but a distant memory, this Street Fighter proved only sporadically entertaining. Even the fight sequences that naturally dominate the proceedings, as colorfully staged as they are, seem underwhelming when action franchises not based on games, like John Wick, have upped the ante for violent mayhem.

Beginning with an animated prologue set in 1987 and a mock tabloid television show segment bringing viewers up to speed, the main story takes place six years later, when brothers-in-arms Ken Masters (Noah Centineo, Black Adam) and Ryu (Andrew Koji, Cinemax’s Warrior) have fallen on hard times after the murder of their mentor Gouken (Don Lee). The drunken Ken spends his time on such things as warbling a karaoke version of a 4 Non Blondes song while an unkempt Ryu is a purveyor of ramen so bad even a stray cat won’t eat it.

The pair are reunited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang, sure to set many adolescent pulses racing), an underling of the evil M. Bison (genre stalwart David Dastmalchian), who recruits them for the upcoming World Warrior tournament. Both Chun-Li and her boss have ulterior motives, Bison seeking to exploit the fighters’ powers for his own nefarious end and Chun-Li secretly an Interpol agent seeking to take Bison down for having murdered her father.

That’s about all the plot you’ll get from me, and frankly from the rest of the film, since it pretty much settles for delivering big-screen versions of so many fan-favorite characters that most of them get short shrift. To describe them here would be pointless, since fans already know who they are and others won’t care. Suffice it to say that they’re a very colorful bunch, played by an ensemble of varying effectiveness that includes such, shall we say, unusual casting choices as singer Orville Peck and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as fighters and former SNL performer Kyle Mooney as Chun-Li’s Interpol handler with a major crush. A CGI-altered Jason Momoa, who also produced, shows up as the green, Hulk-like Blanka. Director Sakurai’s previous credits include The Eric Andre Show and the film Bad Trip, which accounts for the appearance of his frequent collaborator Andre as a bellowing ring announcer.

Filled with vintage pop music needle drops — Ken enters the ring to, what else, “Who Let the Dogs Out” — the film lives up to its oft-repeated mantra “To live is to fight, to fight is to live” with its endless procession of fight scenes, including a steam bath battle between a barely clothed Ryu and a corpulent opponent that would be impressive if it hadn’t been done better in Eastern Promises. But that Cronenberg film didn’t showcase such extravagantly costumed and coiffed fighters, with the design and special effects teams here working overtime to make the actors look like their video game characters.

Centineo proves entertainingly oafish as Ken, while Koji infuses the proceedings with some much-needed gravitas as the emotionally tortured but still kick-ass Ryu. Liang displays impressive charisma as the formidable Chun-Li. Inheriting the villainous role played so memorably by Raul Julia in 1994, Dastmalchian goes for a more creepy than campy approach, with his M. Bison mainly distinguished by his perverse olfactory pleasures.

Although the recent Masters of the Universe crashed and burned with its latest big-screen incarnation (it made up for it somewhat on streaming), Street Fighter demonstrates its confidence with an open ending all but guaranteeing a sequel.