// PC GAMER — GAMING
Street Fighter review roundup: sorry, folks, but it sounds like a mess
The general consensus seems to be that Street Fighter isn't a disaster, but it definitely misses a lot more than it hits.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
I had such high hopes for the Street Fighter movie: The trailers were so promising, the cast so charismatic, and it seemed to get the inherent ridiculousness of the franchise, playing it seriously without ever really taking it too seriously. I mean, you don't put a guy like David Dastmalchian in the role of M. Bison unless you expect him to do something with it, right?
Alas, it seems that this may be a real Tuesday, at least for my Street Fighter movie aspirations. The reviews are in, and they are not especially kind. Street Fighter isn't a complete catastrophe, according to the critical consensus, but I don't think JCVD has to worry about having to turn in his "Best Street Fighter Movie" trophy anytime soon, either.
The story is too thin to support its bloated roster, but IGN reckons the Street Fighter film is "all about landing as many punches as it can before the round timer hits zero. Even though there are plenty of misses, the ones it does manage to land hit hard."
Fans might enjoy the new SF flick, and the performances are "likeable," but its repeated self-knowing acknowledgment of how silly it all is "would land better if the movie ever rose above the stuff it’s making fun of. Instead, 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 videogame adaptations."
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
"The movie is at its most fun when it truly locks in for those high-octane fights and the surprisingly beautiful and not-much-publicized animated sequences," Collider reviewer Aidan Kelley wrote. "Unfortunately, to get to those, you have to deal with a lot of exposition and unengaging character drama."
Despite calling Street Fighter "a fundamentally flawed movie on an underlying storytelling level," ScreenRant's review is one of the more positive takes floating around out there: The film is "buoyed by the overall 'go for broke' tone" and director Kitao Sakurai's "great work helming the film, working with the cast and crew to deliver consistently entertaining fight scenes that are flush with personality and style."
"The sheer absurdity and fevered intensity of the pacing, not to mention some very athletic fight choreography, is good enough to carry things along through the jittery first act," reviewer Matt Singer wrote for ScreenCrush. "But you can only mainline caffeine for so long before it starts to give you a headache."