David Dastmalchian’s eyes roll back as he presses his thumbs into a sniveling scientist’s eye sockets. As the skull cracks and blood splatters across Dastmalchian's forehead, he makes an expression that can be best described as orgasm face. This happens within the first 10 minutes of Street Fighter, in which Dastmalchian plays the fighting game franchise’s chief antagonist, M.
It’s a perfect performance — a masterclass in B-movie camp. Unfortunately, nobody else in Street Fighter is anywhere close to operating on Dastmalchian’s level. And to make matters worse, not even writer-director Kitao Sakurai seems to know what kind of movie he’s making, leading to one of the sloppiest, cringiest, and most incoherent films of the year.
Street Fighter opens with an anime-style flashback, one of several stunning sequences throughout the film animated by Titmouse (The Venture Bros, Big Mouth, The Legend of Vox Machina). At a legendary fighting tournament in Thailand, series protagonist Ryu (Andrew Koji) goes too far, letting his rage fuel a devastating series of blows, while his adoptive brother Ken (Noah Centineo) watches in horror from the sidelines. We then jump a few years forward to the early '90s.
Ryu has gone into hiding, while Ken sold out his own fighting tournament success to become a washed-up celebrity. But when Bison announces a second fighting tournament, neither brother can resist competing — despite the fact that the entire competition is a very obvious trap. The biggest problem with Street Fighter is that it wants to be a serious movie.
Sure, there are lots of jokes and visual gags, and a lot of the character design is downright campy (Cody Rhodes as Guile with his towering, bleach-blonde flattop is a marvel to behold). But the core story of Ken and Ryu is ultimately played as a drama, not a comedy. Centering the story on Ken, the game's eternal "Player 2" character (the Luigi of fighting games to Ryu's Mario), and then exploring his deep-seated insecurities, is actually a pretty clever move, but Sakurai doesn't give that story enough time to marinate in between all the fight scenes.
When Ken and Ryu finally do have their heart-to-heart, it comes across as flat and unearned. The third lead here is Callina Liang as Chun Li, an interpol agent who infiltrates the tournament to take down Bison, while endlessly showing off her rippling thigh muscles in skin-tight outfits. Liang delivers a dramatic performance that feels out of place when she's going up Dastmalchian’s zany energy.
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