Street Fighter's First Room Loved the Fights and Argued About the Rest
After Monday's Los Angeles premiere, social posts called the new film Bloodsport on steroids and a better heir to 1995's Mortal Kombat. Others said it falls flat. It opens Friday.
Paramount let the room talk before the critics did. After Monday’s Los Angeles premiere of Street Fighter, attendees posted short reactions, and by Tuesday the split was already the story. The movie opens Friday. On Wednesday morning Rotten Tomatoes still showed zero full reviews. The posts did not wait.
The nice version sounds like a video-store Friday. ComicBook’s Chris Killian called it Bloodsport on horse steroids, which is a specific kind of compliment if you remember the 1988 fight movie. Critic Maude Garrett said the signature moves gave her goosebumps and counted more than a hundred Easter eggs for people who actually played the games. Andrew J. Salazar wrote that it often feels like a better successor to 1995’s Mortal Kombat than the recent Mortal Kombat films, one of the few big-budget jobs that gets the energy of anime into live action. Noah Centineo’s Ken and Cody Rhodes’s Guile were the names that kept coming up when someone was having fun. Callina Liang’s Chun-Li got the same treatment from the people who liked the fights.
The other half of the room left annoyed. Tessa Smith at Mama’s Geeky liked some of the animation and some of the fights, then said the film ultimately falls flat. Jokes that do not land, a story that feels unfinished, a third act that gets muddy. One viewer found Cammy, M. Bison and Guile hard to recognize. Another wished the movie had taken itself a notch more seriously, even while admitting the choreography works. That is the risk when the director’s last big cultural credit is The Eric Andre Show. Camp is the point until it is the problem.
Kitao Sakurai took the film over after Danny and Michael Philippou, the Talk to Me brothers, walked away. The 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme version is still the one people quote when they want to be mean about game movies, and it sits at 20% on Rotten Tomatoes all these years later. Sakurai has said a sequel is already being written. He has also said it lives or dies on this weekend. Friday is the only review that pays.