Street Fighter review – nostalgia only goes so far in junky fighting game movie

We just had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s giddy, nasty, devilishly fun spin on Capcom’s popular zombie franchise. It gave us renewed hope (after Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Fallout) that video game adaptations could be good, actually.

But now here comes Street Fighter, a garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it, crushing those hopes in its atomic suplex.

Fans certainly won’t mind. They’ve kept the box office’s life bar in the green for these one-on-one fighter adaptations going all the way back to the disastrous 1994 Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and his $10,000-a-week coke problem. They’ll happily tolerate how the new Street Fighter, like those Mortal Kombat movies, can barely string together a cohesive plot, which has clearly been pencilled in as an afterthought between rounds of combat in yet another tournament-style narrative. None of that will matter because they’re just here for the dopamine hits by way of nostalgia.

To that end, the movie exhaustively rolls out all the iconic characters and moves from the games – like Sumo warrior E Honda’s hundred-hand slap or military bro Guile’s flash kick – not to mention some at-times striking anime flashback sequences and a bevy of pop culture ephemera from its early-90s setting. Grainy, UHF quality MTV video segments show Ken (Noah Centineo) to be a self-destructive New Kids on the Block-era celebrity party boy with flashy blond curls, while the needle drops bring back bygone hits like MC Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit and Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It.

It’s all about keeping us pampered in those fond memories from our pubescent childhoods, including bits that bring back the way us preteen boys ogled the 16-bit version of hypersexualized Chun-Li. She’s played in the movie by the lively and commanding Callina Liang, who enters the frame thighs first and unfortunately plays the only character tasked with a gratuitous slow-motion shower scene.

Liang doesn’t let that stuff drag down her performance, which is formidable, while her physicality during fight scenes is genuinely impressive. She’s one of the handful who bring some modest pleasures to the overcrowded mess. WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes, wearing a cartoonish trapezoid blond wig as Guile, is genuinely funny in the way he barks pleasantries and threats in equal measure. Indian movie star Vidyut Jammwal, who is trained in the ancient martial art Kalaripayattu, brings captivating authenticity and hypnotic movements to his all-too-brief scenes as yoga priest Dhalsim. Even controversial comic and manosphere podcaster Andrew Schulz gives a convincing performance worthy of an essay, playing Ken’s manager, who capitalizes on his bro’s brawn while coddling his wounded ego.

But the likable performances get buried in a movie that often feels like it was made on a six-button control pad. Street Fighter is a barrage of character introductions and story arcs lifted from the games and animated spin-offs, colliding into one another in a way that makes a relatively linear plot (it’s a freakin’ fight tournament!) confusing. Did Vega edit this with his Wolverine-like claw hands?

The movie’s most amusing fight arrives early, with Ken and Ryu (Andrew Koji) reunited in a hotel room after a years-long fallout, lured back together for a world championship tournament that the movie’s villain M Bison organized for nefarious purposes. Ken furiously takes wild swings at Ryu. Flying kicks miss the mark. Roundhouses hit nothing but air. Ryu quickly and calmly out-maneuvers, blocking with a pillow and then hilariously slipping the pillow below Ken’s head to catch his wipeout, or tiptoeing away from Ken while planted in a sofa seat. It’s a standout scene that really does feel like it belongs to another, smarter movie.

Elsewhere, during a matchup between Ken and boxer Balrog (played by rapper 50 Cent), Sakurai learns the right lessons from Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, quick cutting between flashy hits and slow-motion impacts, the sloppy mix of blood and drool flying from Ken’s mouth hanging in the air long enough to appreciate its viscosity.

And then there’s Liang’s Chun-Li, whose legwork delivers spectacular action, while her character tends to be the one dragging others down to earth with quick, frank, intermittently funny verbal jabs. She’s the grounded one, standing 10 toes down in purpose and principle. Whenever Ken or Ryu start emoting or waxing philosophical like Steven Seagal or Van Damme in those movies that inspire Street Fighter, Liang’s Chun-Li calls out in the most basic terms how stupid they sound.

There’s several knowing winks at the fans like this, guarding against criticism by owning up to how silly this all is, which 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 video game adaptations.

We know better.

• Street Fighter is out in Australian cinemas now and in the UK and US on 16 October