Quick, change the channel!

I must admit, I have next to no experience with the Street Fighter games. I've only ever touched the Tekken crossover, and I didn't stick with it for very long. However, the series is so legendary that as a gamer I've picked up enough information on it through indirect means to safely be able to tell you that this film adaptation is a poor representation of the franchise, as well as just a lackluster movie in general. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the thing that's kept people coming back to pick up their controllers and throw more hadoukens at each other over the years has been the hyper-muscular fighters themselves and the wild displays of martial arts you can do with them, rather than whatever sort of plot was cooked up. So the way this movie focuses so much on its story while saving almost all of the action for the end shows that nobody involved really understood the appeal of the property they were working on, or at the very least had no idea how to translate it to the screen. Likely a combination of both. I understand that filmmaking requires the final product to have a stronger emphasis on storytelling than the video game industry ever will, but Paul W.S. Anderson showed just how far having a simple premise carry the majority of the narrative weight can get you in a video game based action movie so long as the combat takes center stage, and he completely forgot the blood! Of course, the fights also have to be good too. Unfortunately, here they are not. The amount of view-obscuring cuts that were edited in whenever people start trading blows acts as a obvious and ineffective means of trying to hide the fact that Jean Claude Van Damme was the only actual martial artist on set. The writing is also really bad. It doesn't even get fanservice right. You'll see plenty of fan-favorite characters, but with the exception of Ming-Na Wen and Andrew Bryniarski as Chun-Li and Zangief respectively, all of them are horribly, horribly miscast. At no point will you see them perform any of their signature moves either. An undercurrent of humor is all this film has going for it. There were a few moments and one-liners that had me genuinely cracking up. Plus, I always kind of admire this type of cinema that doesn't take itself too seriously. Fully embracing its own stupidity with a somewhat straight face for the sole purpose of entertaining the audience with schlocky thrills and a knowing wink. Especially when it comes with a side of '90s cheese like this one does. That being said, Street Fighter: The Movie tested even my patience. Meaning the best advice I can give you in regards to this one is to go watch Mortal Kombat again.