Street Fighter movie early reviews, two days before release: half see a '90s classic, the rest see a 'chaotic mixed bag'
If you want a loud, silly, very good-looking brawler, the early word on Street Fighter says you'll get one. If you want a story that holds together, most of the people who have seen it, including several who loved it, say you won't.
Kitao Sakurai's adaptation opens on October 16 from Legendary and Paramount. Sakurai directed Bad Trip and spent years on The Eric Andre Show, which explains a good deal of what follows. The film is set in 1993: Andrew Koji's Ryu and Noah Centineo's Ken haven't spoken in years when Callina Liang's Chun-Li drags them back into the World Warrior Tournament.
The rest of the roster reads like a wrestling card merged with a comedy lineup. David Dastmalchian plays M. Bison, Roman Reigns is Akuma, Cody Rhodes is Guile, Jason Momoa is Blanka, 50 Cent is Balrog, Vidyut Jammwal is Dhalsim and Andrew Schulz is Dan Hibiki.
The premiere was in Los Angeles on October 12, and Paramount let screening audiences post short reactions. Full reviews are embargoed until tomorrow, a day before the film opens, so for now those reactions are the best read there is, and they line up more than the headlines suggest.
What the '90s-classic half is praising
The enthusiastic posts agree on four things, and none of them is the story:
- The fights — ComicBook.com's Chris Killian called it "Bloodsport on horse steroids," and meant it as praise.
- The decade — Brandon Davis, formerly of ComicBook.com, filed it as "A 90s throwback with visual nostalgia," and he meant the humor and the casting as much as the look.
- The animation — Ryu and Ken's backstory plays out in 2D anime sequences instead of de-aged actors or child performers. It is the single most praised element across both camps.
- The comparison — at least one reaction ranks it as a better successor to 1995's Mortal Kombat than either of the recent Mortal Kombat films, which is a compliment only somebody who grew up in the '90s would think to pay.
The animation was a deliberate swerve. Sakurai needed the audience to know Ryu and Ken's history and didn't trust any of the usual tools for showing it.
Sakurai described the anime flashbacks as "a weird, bold choice to animate these backstory sequences," taken because the games' roots in anime run too deep to ignore.
It is also the one decision nobody has complained about yet.
Where the 'chaotic mixed bag' came from
The phrase belongs to Phil Roberts of Future of the Force, and it travels without its second half.
"A chaotic mixed bag of action, anime madness, epic characters, combos," Roberts wrote of the film.
The same post goes on to credit Sakurai's work behind the camera and call the result one of the year's most visually striking blockbusters. The genuinely negative reactions are narrower, and most of them come from people who love the games:
- The plot — /Film's Bill Bria: "Sadly, it literally loses the plot one too many times."
- The jokes — Mark Cassidy, a self-described big fan of the series, put the humor "below American Pie levels of juvenile" and said he lost count of the gay jokes.
- The weight — Tessa Smith of Mama's Geeky said it "ultimately falls flat" and feels like half a movie.
- The ending — more than one reaction calls the final stretch abrupt and built mainly to set up a sequel.
Which half you'll be in
Nobody disputes what's on the screen. The fights are good, the animation is better, the jokes are broad and the story thins out in the back half. Matt Rodgers of Flickering Myth thinks the film is at its best when it stops taking itself seriously; Cassidy came out of the same scenes wishing it had taken itself "just a little more seriously."
The two camps aren't arguing about quality. They're arguing about whether silliness is the point of a Street Fighter movie or the price of one.
The franchise has already tried both answers on the big screen, and neither one worked.
The bar, for context
Sakurai set his film in 1993, which also happens to be the last year in which nobody had yet made a live-action Street Fighter movie.
The first one arrived in December 1994 and went all in on camp. Steven E. de Souza wrote and directed it, with Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile, and it holds 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was Raúl Juliá's final theatrical role: he died two months before it opened, and his Bison is the one thing in it people still defend. The 2009 attempt, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, played it straight and sits at 3%.
Don't miss: Clayface's first reactions are raves — its box office tracking still looks like Madame Web
Prediction-market traders on Kalshi are currently forecasting 43% for Sakurai's version. That would be rotten, and still nearly four times the 1994 score. Sakurai has said a sequel is already being written, and that whether it gets made depends on how this one lands.
For the record: the film opens in IMAX and 3D as well as standard screens. If you're weighing the pricier ticket, the one thing no reaction from either half has complained about is how it looks.
Previously we wrote: Joe Russo picked Tom Holland as the last movie star — Beekeeper fans have a better answer