Reviews are in for the new live-action “Street Fighter” film and, though a franchise best, they’re still not good.
With 54 reviews counted, the film sits at just 43% (4.9/10) on Rotten Tomatoes and a 45/100 on Metacritic.
That is above the 20% (3.6/10) of the 1994 film and well above the 3% (2.3/10) of 2009’s ‘Legend of Chun-Li’ movie, but it’s still not good and notably weaker than the two recent “Mortal Kombat” films at 55% (5.5/10) and 63% (5.7/10).
While many reviews cite the film having some fun moments worthy of praise, the overall film is being panned for being essentially a mess that never quite works, even as the cast is obviously having fun doing it.
Here’s a sampling of review quotes:
“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
“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
“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
“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, THR
“The plot, in a movie like this, is not the point. The best thing it can do is get out of the way and allow us to get lost in the spectacle. But that’s exactly where Street Fighter stumbles, distracting from the action with incoherent storytelling.” – Jen Lennon, io9
“This year’s Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat 2 proved that video-games can be given new life on the big screen, mixing thrills, action, humor, and self-awareness. Street Fighter assembles those elements but never lands on a formula that functions.” – Alonso Duralde, The Film Verdict
“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
Budgeted at $82 million, the film has a PG-13 rating and is expected to have a worldwide debut of nearly $70 million this weekend.
