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Street Fighter — Review
Coming right off the success of Zach Cregger’s excellent depiction of how it feels to play “Resident Evil” and the smartly simple fun of May’s “Mortal Kombat II,” this weekend’s “Street Fighter” is a reminder that not everyone has yet got the memo of how to succeed, or rather not fail, at bringing gaming to the big screen. Instead, Kitao Sakurai’s fighting game adaptation is a film too incompetent to fill in the cracks spurred from its own self-consciousness about wanting to be anything more than a dumb video game movie.
The plot is this: two brothers by childhood dojo, Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), are forced into reconciling with their pasts and each other when Chun-Li (a dull Callina Liang) tracks them down to join the second World Warrior Tournament. Now reduced down to a disgraced TV spot (though still notable enough to get a Taco Bell menu item in his name), Ken joins the tournament to prove his real worth. Meanwhile Ryu, working as a vendor of potently smelling ramen out of fear of releasing the fighting beast inside of him, begrudgingly follows in an attempt to stop him from participating, knowing the shadowy figure from their past, Akuma (Roman Reigns), will be awakened by the winner.
The main champions are rounded up by David Dastmalchian playing an unfortunately extremely annoyingly weird Mt. Bison who’s plotted the entire fighting tournament as…
