Spoilers follow for Street Fighter.
Put on your gis and gloves, fighting fans, because Street Fighter is now in theaters. The latest attempt to adapt the venerated fighting game franchise for the big screen may not be getting off to the best start with critics, but fans of the series will likely go check it out for themselves. The film does have its positive aspects, such as the gorgeous 2D animation used for flashback sequences as well as plenty of easter eggs and fighting moves ripped right from the classic games. But as a whole, Street Fighter is too slapdash to be a fully satisfying cinematic experience, and one of the biggest reasons why is that the film doesn’t use the seemingly obvious way to structure itself.
Street Fighter is a game about a fighting tournament, and while there is technically a tournament in the film, it isn’t the main focus. In fact, the movie goes out of its way to make the tournament feel like a largely incidental part of the plot, and this hurts the movie in more ways than one. What makes this even more bizarre is that this is a mistake that Mortal Kombat already made in the 2021 reboot, but the filmmakers behind Street Fighter didn’t learn the lesson from their fellow fighting franchise. How did this happen? Let’s take a look.
World of Warriors
Street Fighter may be the first movie in this new continuity, but it takes its cast and premise from the second game, Street Fighter II. This is a smart move, since not only is Street Fighter II the most famous game in the franchise, but the first entry is commonly considered to be a well-meaning prototype for a series that didn’t fully come together until the sequel. The movie doesn’t erase the first game though, instead incorporating the first World Warrior tournament and Ryu’s victory over Muay Thai master Sagat into the animated pre-title sequence to give us backstory for our main characters, Ryu and Ken Masters. The main plot picks up six years later when main villain M. Bison sets up a second World Warrior tournament in the hopes of enticing Ryu into the spotlight to defend his title so that Bison can steal Ryu’s Hado power — that’s the energy that powers his famous Hadoken move from the games.
The tournament draws in many notable fighters from around the world, and while you would think the tournament would take up a big chunk of the runtime, it really doesn’t. Bison puts up only a cursory front of interest in the tournament, immediately kidnapping Ryu and absconding to his lab to work on draining Ryu’s Hado power. Ken wants to become the champion to prove himself to his deceased master Gouken, but his efforts to win the tournament only make up about half of his story. Ryu doesn’t participate at all on account of being kidnapped before it starts, even though he goes through the trouble of defeating E. Honda ahead of time to take his spot in the roster. Nor does Chun-Li, who — egregiously for the film — was the only woman who competed in the game. While nearly every Street Fighter II character is present in some capacity, the film moves many of the major players to the margins of the actual tournament.
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