From the moment Legendary Pictures and Capcom revealed its new live-action Street Fighter, there was a ceiling placed above it. This movie could either be so bad it’s good or so bad it’s just bad. There wasn’t a third option, at least, that’s what I thought for around a year. It turns out, there is a third option: it’s both.

Street Fighter is basically two movies in one: It is one half the aforementioned “so bad it’s good” flick, running into walls hard enough to break through them as it shatters the shackles of a faithful adaptation and becomes an incomprehensible parody of Capcom’s fighting games. Also equally present is the “so bad it’s bad” film that is baffling from both a filmmaking and storytelling perspective. Both of these movies are connected by fights that are fun to watch and disconnected by ones it refuses to show. The strained threads that manage to hold it all together are a constant barrage of bits of varying quality that every actor commits to with such tenacity that it all somehow turns around to being brilliant?

To be clear: Street Fighter ’s a bad movie. It’s incoherent, edited in ways that don’t make any sense, and the gap between its best performances and worst ones is wider than the skill difference between a mediocre player picking up Street Fighter for the first time and the all-time great Daigo Umehara. Also, the way it treats the few women on the roster, performing character assassination on Cammy by essentially turning her from a stoic, duty-driven Doll into a crazed Juri stand-in and injecting some truly out-of-pocket horniness into Chun-Li’s scenes at the expense of their gravity, sucks ass.

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