I am trying to write this article, but all I can think about are Chun-Li’s thighs. I have a problem. For God’s sake, focus, man! OK, here we go… Reviews are in for the new live-action Street Fighter movie and they are not good.
Genuinely, though, is that a surprise? It never really felt like the kind of movie critics were going to connect with. I can’t imagine Pete Bradshaw of the Guardian spitting his super-sized Coke out with excitement as a fighter conjures up a fireball from their fists.
The professional critics have it at 43% from 63 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes as of the time of writing this morning. There are currently no audience reviews or scores. It’s a better score than any previous entry in the franchise, but it still isn’t good.
It might not keep audiences away, as the movie is tracking to open to around $70 million against a budget of just over $80 million. Maybe sometimes you just want to see a dude punch another dude?
So what are the pros saying? To the summary pages!
“A film that overflows with convoluted plotting and confusingly engineered jokes. But a film’s greatest sin is boring its audience, and this Street Fighter should take pride in never coming close to doing that.”
Christian Zilko, Indiewire
“At its best, Street Fighter operates like a deranged live-action cartoon, which is exactly what I wanted from it. However, this makes critiquing its fundamental filmmaking flaws feel like missing the point on an epic scale.”
Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
“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.”
Radheyan Simonpillai, The Guardian
“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.”
Jake Coyle, Associated Press
“It simply feels like the natural zenith of an arcade player’s imagination, the “and then, and then” output of fighter fantasies running wild. By the end, you can practically see the ’90s kid smashing and kicking at the air on his way out of the theater.”
Brandon Yu, The New York Times
“Street Fighter tries to thread the needle between fan service and welcoming the uninitiated. The result is that neither camp is likely to be fully satisfied.”
Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
Street Fighter opens this weekend.
