STREET FIGHTER
Starring: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Eric André, Andrew Schulz, Vidyut Jammwal, Orville Peck, Don Lee, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, and Jason Momoa
Director: Kitao Sakurai
AMARÚ
There’s something worthy in this Street Fighter movie, and after the opening scene I thought that maybe writer-director Kitao Sakurai had figured out the right formula. Nope. He wastes a mostly well-casted ensemble by wandering through a 90s aesthetic with wildly incongruent tones, unserious writing, and horrible editing. Not only does it feel like chunks of this film are missing, but actual chunks of the film were purposefully left out. These bad decisions (including humor that insufferably went for 90s shock-jock instead of 90s camp) got exponentially worse as the movie rattled on, and they amounted to the most disappointing film of the year.
ADRIANO
For what it’s worth, Street Fighter’s commitment to its anarchy and oddball sensibilities is admirable, especially with its funny stunt casting and sick anime sequences. But all in all, this was bad. No, I didn’t need the story to be deep or anything like that. What I needed was for it to be cohesive. Despite the eccentric energy, the story is crudely stitched together with weird creative decisions and obnoxious needle drops, so the movie just becomes noise that doesn’t even have an ending, and isn’t close to being fun enough to cancel out any of this.
ROBERT
I hate to break it to the world, but video game movies don’t have to have the depth of the Marianas Trench. If the vibes are alright, we will watch it all night. Street Fighter makes a lot of questionable calls: casting, pacing, what they deemed important to show versus tell, etc. However, I had an absolute blast with the stylistic fighting and the character mashups. While tenuous, the plot was cobbled together enough to not make me question everything. I think this is a stronger film as an animated endeavor since it uses that technique well, but I crave at least one more round.
