Movie Review: 'Street Fighter' is a campy '90s nostalgia ride and a complete mess

Since we're going back to the 1990s in “Street Fighter,” let's use a “Seinfeld” episode to describe how I felt coming out of Kitao Sakurai’s adaptation of the vintage arcade game.

When Cosmo Kramer starts showing up at a corporate office despite never being hired, his boss looks over his first report and, befuddled, says “I don’t know what this is supposed to be.”

That's a fair reaction to Sakurai's very enthusiastic, weirdly convoluted and jumbled mess of a movie. 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.

Capcom released the first “Street Fighter” in 1987. Many iterations have followed, but the 1991 sequel, “Street Fighter II,” is the most famous. In the first “Street Fighter,” you could play as either martial artist Ryu or the American Ken Masters. But “Street Fighter II” was one of the first to craft a basic setup: You choose from a bunch of fighters and enter a martial arts tournament.

This background is notable because “Street Fighter” doesn’t know who its main characters are, or at least frequently forgets. Noah Centineo plays Ken and Andrew Koji is Ryu, but there are many more in the mix, including Callina Liang (the movie’s most kinetic performer) as Chun-Li, Jason Momoa as the green, CGI-enabled meanie Blanka, Cody Rhodes as the flat-topped Guile and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as the boxer Balrog.

“Street Fighter” begins with an anime flashback to 1987, and you immediately sense that animation probably is the best format for the story. The backstory sketches the death of Ken and Ryu’s master and their subsequent falling out. Then the movie shifts to 1993, when the World Warrior Tournament draws Ryu, Ken and a clown car’s worth of fighters.

“Street Fighter” is going for a goofy good time, full of kitschy ’90s nostalgia and stuffed with songs like “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and “2 Legit 2 Quit.” If video game adaptations have come a long way in the last decade, “Street Fighter” feels like a throwback to when they were campy, almost intentionally bad and not much more than a chance to see actors cosplay as video game characters. (With a meta wink, the masked country musician Orville Peck plays the masked henchman Vega.)

The movie's retrograde vibe — complete with leering shots of Liang's body — feels all the more out of step coming on the heels of more ambitious video game adaptations like Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil.” This “Street Fighter” feels perilously on par with the first “Street Fighter” movie, the 1994 action film with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Sakurai, a regular collaborator with comedian Eric André (who appears as a TV commentator), films every scene like a fight scene. To be fair, many of the scenes are fight scenes, even if we have only a vague sense of why everyone's so angry with each other. The script by Sakurai and T.J. Fixman curiously focuses less on the tournament itself than the testosterone-amped drama surrounding it.

The marquee melee is a scheme by M. Bison (David Dastmalchian, trying to inject some comic life into the movie), a fascist dictator who’s seeking to enhance his power with Ryu’s. Roman Reigns, one of several professional wrestlers trying to make a mark in “Street Fighter,” co-stars as the antihero Akuma.

But the scenes clash together as much as the fighters do. As the movie draws to a close without a finale, the clipped dialogue and confused pacing suggest considerable post-production cutting and pasting. Ending with some overly optimistic sequel baiting, “Street Fighter” feels almost designed to be the straw man in the “Digger” discourse : If you don’t embrace artistic gambles, movies like this are what you might get instead.

Either way, by the time someone pleads, like a tired parent, to the bickering warriors piled into the backseat of a car, it's hard not to feel similarly: “Guys, stop fighting.”

“Street Fighter,” a Paramount Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for violence/action, bloody images, strong language, sexual references, partial nudity and brief smoking. One star out of four.