Street Fighter

I actually quite enjoyed what should have been the core of this movie (the Ryu and Ken story), at least relative to my expectations of a Street Fighter movie, but what ends up taking me out of it was all the shoehorned references and nods and kind of odd characterizations that they kept throwing in our faces as well as the constant jumping back and forth between the 2D and Live Action scenes.

I probably enjoy a lot of references more than the typical viewer, but even for me, I think having so many characters shoved in and plotlines from multiple games ended up being an active detriment to the story and characters that I actually was enjoying more than I expected. There were definitely references that I enjoyed, but there were also a quite a few that just felt like they were saying "HEY LOOK WE KNOW BALL" and expected us to clap. There was also the whole interpol plotline with Chun Li which really served no purpose and quite literally could have been an email or a phone call of a side plot, and that's just kind of an example of the bloat in this movie. The decision to also have both Bison and Akuma plots in the story also felt too ambitious (but also c'mon we all know that Bison can't touch Akuma, so that feels like a weird plot decision).

I think the two biggest grievances I had with the film were the characterizations of Cammy and M. Bison who I felt like were different than their game counterparts, but not in a good way. Cammy just felt so jarring and weird in a distracting way anytime she talked or was on screen and I just found her to be kind of annoying overall. Even though I like David Dastmalchian, Bison's constant sniffing and mannerisms just felt really weird and not in a way that really added anything for me as well.

TLDR; There were was an enjoyable core for this movie, but there were a lot of weird throw ins or changes to characters that were bad or distracting, and there was a lot of bloat in this movie.

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