The kind of movie that when you walk out of it you imagine asking the director “This? This was what you intended to make?”

It’s cold comfort, but I have to imagine the answer here would be “No!”

I was a big fan of Kitao Sakurai’s previous movie Bad Trip, which I consider to be probably the funniest movie of the decade so far (The Old Man Movie was 2019) and I do think it was a genuine tragedy that the pandemic meant it didn’t play to full houses because it absolutely should have. I have to admit that an extension of Eric Andre’s bits into a feature length film is a bit of a different proposition than a big budget martial arts film based on a beloved video game franchise, but the trailer was good. It got me!

I wrote when I watched Rogue Trooper (yet to receive a full release) that a major problem with the film was the urge to jam in everything they liked about the series into one film, and while with that film it still more-or-less works, here there’s a sense that Sakurai—or the producers—really wanted to hit every possible reference they could, but it’s like they they threw everything they vaguely remembered about Street Fighter into a bag, jumbled it about and emptied it on the floor and called it a script. It is a disaster.

I’m a defender of the 1994 Street Fighter (if you can’t have fun with it, you’re doing something wrong.) Even if you don’t like it (philistine!) if you want an example of how badly wrong this version gets it, this film cribs M. Bison’s most famous line of the film (absolutely iconic, justifies Street Fighter 1994’s existence on its own) by having M. Bison recite half of it in a context where it has absolutely no resonance. But hey… someone said the line! That’s all that matters!

This is an astonishingly slapdash film that has to be the result of a desperate attempt to save it in the edit, with what feels like an endless amount of botches and bodges from mild annoyances to absolute structural calamities. Shouldn’t it matter that if you’re explicitly setting your first scene in 1987 that a character is listening to a song from 1993? When the movie then moves to 1993, where that song makes sense, wouldn’t it be better to, say, not have a character’s entrance music be Who Let The Dogs Out? Not just because that came out in 2000, but because Who Let The Dogs Out is annoying, and I’m annoyed you reminded me of it?

(I hope Dean Ween never sees this.)

All the humour falls flat. There’s a lot of Eric Andre sweating through scenes where he’s clearly been told to riff (it doesn’t work) and a running joke is that… Guile is gay? Is that the joke? Maybe? I mean Andrew Schulz, who sucks, is in this, and the only reason to have him play Dan is to make a joke and a mockery of him, and they don’t even do that!

But the main problem is that the story just does not work. I would like to assemble the producers of this, the recent Mortal Kombat and many many other movies of the sort and ask: why do you hate featuring fighting tournaments in movies that are about fighting tournaments? This one features a tournament where we see almost none of the fights, and several matches are forfeits? You wrote that into the film???

Ryu spends most of the film in jail? Characters discuss a conversation that happened that we didn’t see, and then we immediately see a flashback to that conversation? Why do it that way? Most of the cast don’t do anything, and the web of relationships is nonsensical anyway?

And then the movie doesn’t have a proper ending? Like… at all?

You know what, fuck it. This article doesn’t get one either. That’s how bad this is.

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