[COLUMN] Street Fighter Needs More Street Fighting | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Street Fighter, in theatres now. If you’re looking for a quick recommendation, I unfortunately did not really care for it. The film’s opening act is good fun, but it takes a catastrophic left turn after about thirty minutes and never looks back.

The best and worst thing that can be said about Street Fighter is that it feels like the kind of movie that a twelve-year-old might make while high on energy drinks after an eight-hour binge play session.

The film feels in some ways like a throwback to an older form of blockbuster. There is, for example, a constant sense of gay panic permeating the production. Arriving in the midst of a stand-off in a bar, Balrog (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) threatens to beat off any comers, before clarifying that he did not intend that as a double entendre. Dan Stevens would blush. The hypermasculine Guile (Cody Rhodes) seemingly struggles to go two sentences without ruminating on Vega’s (Orville Peck) body.

This homoeroticism is all fun and games, as the camera luxuriates on the female cast members’ bodies. Callina Liang reportedly grew her thighs by 6.5cm to play Chun-Li, and the movie never misses an opportunity to put them on display. Every female character in the film – Chun-Li, Cammy (Mel Jarnson), Juli (Rayna Vallandingham) – are all essentially dominatrices, often shot from behind at waist height. When Chun-Li compiles evidence and exposition, she helpfully does it in her underwear.

Still, for all this juvenilia, there is a certain charm to Street Fighter – at least in its opening half-hour. The film presents itself with a surprisingly robust emotional core, following alienated adopted brothers Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo) as they attempt to heal the rift caused by the death of their master, Gouken (Don Lee). Naturally, a fighting tournament organized by the dictator M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) provides the perfect forum for healing.

In the opening act, director Kitao Sakurai builds a fairly compelling adaptation. Flashback sequences to the death of Gouken are animated in style designed to evoke anime, seemingly in homage to the much-loved Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which released the same year as the less-loved live action adaptation. However, even during the live-action sequences set in the present day, the character and production design has a delightful exaggerated cartoon aesthetic to it.

There is a playfulness to that opening act. There’s an early hotel room fight between Ken and Ryu that serves to provide an interesting backdrop to an exposition dump, with Ryu skillfully using the environment to avoid Ken’s blows. At one point, Ryu simply steps backwards to get out of the way of Ken’s flying kick, in what feels like a wry nod towards the two-dimensional logic of these sorts of fighting games. There’s a similar energy to Ryu’s steam room battle with E. Honda (Hirooki Goto).

In that first half-hour, the stakes of Street Fighter are nice and clear, and designed to give the audience what they want from a Street Fighter movie. Bison is organizing the tournament as a gambit to lure Ryu out of retirement, so he can harvest his “Psycho Power.” The tournament involves eight contestants, which is a manageable number – allowing for seven fights and a boss battle. And Ryu and Ken are seeded on opposite sides of the table, making a final clash inevitable.

It is a remarkably simple set-up, particularly in an era where these sorts of adaptations can become very lore-heavy and convoluted. Like Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat, the opening act of Street Fighter seems to grasp that the most logical and satisfying way to structure an adaptation of a beat-’em-up is through a tournament. Bison presumably lets them all fight, waits for the winner – presumably Ryu – to emerge, and then scoops him up and harvests his “Psycho Power.”

However, despite building a fairly solid foundation for a film like this, Street Fighter just cannot help itself. It becomes immediately clear that the film is completely disinterested in the actual street fighting. The tournament unfolds in the background of the movie, completely out of focus. Guile loses to Vega off-screen. In an in-joke, Joe (Alexander Volkanovski) wins the tournament by default as each of his opponents fail to show up. Only two fights happen on-screen: Ken versus Balrog, Ken versus Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal).

Instead, Street Fighter decides to go all-in on lore. And the movie descends into a cacophony of chaos. Bison abducts Ryu outright. He makes him fight a computer-generated Blanka (Jason Momoa). Ken drops out of the finale to rescue Ryu. Bison inducts Chun-Li into his inner circle. Interpol tries to bring Chun-Li home. Chun-Li attacks Bison in his office. Bison defeats her, leaves her unconscious. Guile loans Ken a bunch of commandos to rescue Ryu. Ken and Ryu are captured. They escape.

This is all needlessly complicated. There is a strong sense watching Street Fighter that it might as well have been edited by Vega, with his clawed hands. It is perhaps too much to ask a Street Fighter film to adhere to any internal logic, but if the film is going to lean this hard on plot, the plot should at least make some sort of sense. Instead, the character motivations and the plotting are a mess of contradictions and gaps that cannot carry the weight placed upon them.

Most obviously, and – thanks to Rhodes’ charismatic performance – most damningly, Guile disappears for the final act of the movie. Right after telling his handlers that they need to render some assistance to Ken on his rescue mission, Guile disappears into a toilet stall and a flush is heard. Guile does not reappear until the final scene, when he and Dhalsim pick up Ken, Ryu and Chun-Li and drive towards the sequel.

So, does Guile tell Ken that he is sending the commandos? Is Guile part of the commando team that helps to rescue Ryu? Given how quickly Ken and Ryu are captured again, one imagines that the sort of military infrastructure that Guile can provide would be quite useful. If nothing else, the movie misses the obvious joke of putting Guile’s distinctive (popcorn bucket worthy) hair style in a balaclava, which would make all of this worthwhile.

And then there is the Chun-Li of it all. When Chun-Li storms Bison’s office, she seems motivated in part by a sense of desperation. Specifically, Cammy has just told her that, since he now has Ryu in his clutches, Bison will lose any and all interest in Chun-Li. However, this makes no sense. Bison inducted Chun-Li into his inner circle – complete with branding of questionable sanitary quality – the morning after he captured Ryu in the wake of the barfight. So, why would he lose interest in her after that?

However, after defeating Chun-Li, Bison just leaves her lying unconscious in his office. He doesn’t kill her while she is unconscious. He doesn’t send her to the dungeons. Instead, he just leaves her under a pile of rubble. Given that presumably he’ll be returning to that office at some point – even after harvesting all the necessary “Psycho Power” from Ryu – it just seems very sloppy for an evil villain who went to the hassle of organizing an international street fighting tournament.

Bison is another problem with the movie. Bison is very clearly set up as the villain of the film. Chun-Li has a vendetta against him. He is trying to capture Ryu and harvest Ryu’s power. He is the dictator of the country in which the tournament is taking place. The film spends multiple scenes revelling in his villainy and his Tarantino-esque foot fetishism. He even gets a cute homage to Raul Julia’s famous “for me it was Tuesday” speech.

However, Bison ultimately has nothing to do with how the movie resolves itself. Despite the film having no real interest in the street fighting tournament, the plot’s resolution depends on the outcome of the street fighting tournament. It seems that Joe’s unchallenged ascent to the top of the proverbial heap has attracted the attention of the demon Akuma (Joe Anoa'i), who had murdered Gouken and – to that point – had only appeared in the anime flashback sequences.

The film ends with Akuma killing Joe, Ryu defeating Akuma and in the process unleashing his own inner demons, and then Ken stepping in to defeat Ryu and saving his brother from his own worst self. There is a version of this movie where that would be a satisfying ending. That version of the movie would have done more to seed Akuma, would have downplayed Bison’s role and would have focused on the tournament instead of reducing it to a weird joke.

There is, throughout Street Fighter, a sense that the film is far more interested in lore than it is in storytelling. It is a Street Fighter movie that is strangely disinterested in street fighting. Entire characters, like Blanka, could easily be deleted from the film and would make for a much more satisfying and cohesive narrative. And the film is far too invested in setting up a potential sequel than it is in earning that sequel through constructing a satisfying narrative.

It turns out that our princess is in another castle. All the focus and attention on Bison in Street Fighter is just to set up a sequel where presumably Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li will actually face him. As it stands, the film ends with Bison driving off delivering the game’s trademark “you lose” catchphrase as Cammy finally does something vaguely useful by firing a rocket launcher and blowing up the trio’s van to prevent them from giving chase.

It is incredible how hard Street Fighter works to squander the good will that it earns in its opening half-hour, essentially spending the next ninety minutes indulging in plotty nonsense that ultimately serves as a springboard to a sequel seemingly designed to be more of the same. It isn’t just Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li who lose. It’s the audience.