The general consensus seems to be that Street Fighter isn't a disaster, but it definitely misses a lot more than it hits.



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I had such high hopes for the Street Fighter movie: The trailers were so promising, the cast so charismatic, and it seemed to get the inherent ridiculousness of the franchise, playing it seriously without ever really taking it too seriously. I mean, you don't put a guy like David Dastmalchian in the role of M. Bison unless you expect him to do something with it, right?

Alas, it seems that this may be a real Tuesday, at least for my Street Fighter movie aspirations. The reviews are in, and they are not especially kind. Street Fighter isn't a complete catastrophe, according to the critical consensus, but I don't think JCVD has to worry about having to turn in his "Best Street Fighter Movie" trophy anytime soon, either.

Here's what they're saying:

IGN: 6/10

The story is too thin to support its bloated roster, but IGN reckons the Street Fighter film is "all about landing as many punches as it can before the round timer hits zero. Even though there are plenty of misses, the ones it does manage to land hit hard."

The Guardian: 2/5

Fans might enjoy the new SF flick, and the performances are "likeable," but its repeated self-knowing acknowledgment of how silly it all is "would land better if the movie ever rose above the stuff it’s making fun of. Instead, Street Fighter is satisfied punching down on itself, and everything that’s cringe about the '90s, while happily being stuck there, in the past, so it could pretend that this is as good as it gets for videogame adaptations."

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Collider: 6/10



"The movie is at its most fun when it truly locks in for those high-octane fights and the surprisingly beautiful and not-much-publicized animated sequences," Collider reviewer Aidan Kelley wrote. "Unfortunately, to get to those, you have to deal with a lot of exposition and unengaging character drama."

ScreenRant: 7/10

Despite calling Street Fighter "a fundamentally flawed movie on an underlying storytelling level," ScreenRant's review is one of the more positive takes floating around out there: The film is "buoyed by the overall 'go for broke' tone" and director Kitao Sakurai's "great work helming the film, working with the cast and crew to deliver consistently entertaining fight scenes that are flush with personality and style."

ScreenCrush: 5/10

"The sheer absurdity and fevered intensity of the pacing, not to mention some very athletic fight choreography, is good enough to carry things along through the jittery first act," reviewer Matt Singer wrote for ScreenCrush. "But you can only mainline caffeine for so long before it starts to give you a headache."

Associated Press: 1/4

Street Fighter is a "very enthusiastic, weirdly convoluted and jumbled mess of a movie," Jake Coyle wrote for AP. As much as you might think a Street Fighter movie, good or bad, would at least offer up some bluntly entertaining hand-to-hand combat, it’s so messily plotted and chaotically conceived that it makes a game with six buttons seem comparatively artful."

The Film Verdict

Street Fighter "is a little bit of everything that amounts to a lot of not-much," The Film Verdict declared, comparing it unfavorably to this year's Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil flicks: Street Fighter has all the elements that made those films successful, "but never lands on a formula than functions."

The Wrap



This review takes a more holistic approach to Street Fighter, calling it "an action-packed, hyper-stylized, borderline-nonsensical fever dream with a central storyline that begs to be taken seriously" despite being goofy, horny, largely incoherent, and somehow "even weirder" than the 1990s movie. But hey, maybe that's your thing: As reviewer William Bi...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

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