This is a really good watch for everybody who played the famous Street Fighter video game when they were younger. But it also worth a watch for everybody who didn't. We follow the two young men I mentioned in the title of this review on their road to becoming supreme martial artists. Ken is the more extroverted of the two, Caucasian and truly talented, who really looks more like a surfer than like as fighter. However, he is also probably sometimes too boastful for his own good. Ryu is the calmer one, Asian, with an advantage in mental strength and he does not fear any challenge no matter how hard it is to achieve or how long it will take him. The two are like brothers.This mini-series is written and directed by Joey Ansah, who also plays a character in here as he is a trained martial artist himself. I read that he next plans a similar miniseries starring Guile and Chun Li and I'd certainly love to watch that. Now about this one here, it runs for 13 episodes (including a very short prologue) and has a total runtime of roughly 2.5 hours, so you can really watch it in one go. Each episode runs for 10-13 minutes. The actor who plays Ken here helped Ansah with the script. Ansah made a short film back in 2010 together with him already, but still with a different actor for Ryu. I have to say this mini-series here is maybe at its weakest when it only focuses on Ryu and that happens a couple times as he is probably even more lead character than Ken. Still the two do belong together and also get a great ending where they go off into the world with their trainer staying behind. And as Ken says at that point, the adventure had only just begun. Occasionally, I felt in the second half that they may not have enough quality material to make this worth watching for 150 minutes, but every time I began thinking like that, the level rose once again quickly after, for example in entertaining moments when Ken cuts of his ponytail or when the two protagonists play video games themselves. Pretty hilarious moment. If they had actually picked a fighter game, this would have been a truly odd situation. But in a positive way of course.The whole thing came out exactly a year ago today and that is why I decided giving it a look, but also because I really loved the video game as a kid. Recommended and I would love to see a real Street Fighter movie soon including more than only two crucial characters.

So first let me say that I'm a huge street fighter fan.A lot of people seem to love this, but I was kind of left cold. Also, I didn't know this was a TV series- I saw it as a "movie" (all 180 minutes in one sitting). As you can imagine, I was constantly annoyed that this "movie" felt like a really drawn out TV show...so I'll try not to complain too much about pacing and call-backs, but I still have lots of positives and negatives to share: +The attention to visual details is awesome- especially in the choreography. The moves and poses the characters make could be taken directly from the game. This is the only street fighter movie/show I've ever seen that consistently keeps the choreography consistent with the game for every fight (for better or worse...).+Ken. He is the best part of the show, and for the most part he's fun to watch (when he's given something to do).+Acting (for most). Goki and Goken were very good, and Gotetsu was amazing. The show could have just focused on him.+Imagery. Occasionally, the show has some great shots- but these are few and far between...+True to canon. For the most part, this is what I thought the back story should be based on the video game.So now what I didn't like: -Too limited! My major complaint is that the show feels too limited in scope. Seeing the same sets used for 180 minutes straight was very tiresome. I was dying to see them leave the damn dojo and go do something! Maybe this is because it was a low-budget thing? Even so, the writing didn't quite sparkle on its own either, which leads me to...-Lackluster script. My second biggest complaint is that the script lacks heart. I didn't care about Ryu at all (and he's my favorite character!) and though the actor playing Ken was great, he was barely given lines to work with at all. Even the all-important back story with Goki and Goken was so abrupt and choppy that it felt completely unreal to me. Everything that was supposed to be important and emotional felt rushed and under-developed. The actors tried their best, but almost none of the lines gave them any personality or edge. The characters felt 2-dimensional (so to speak) and lifeless.-Sterile action. I love the attention given the individual moves and imagery from the game, but there comes a point where you need to loosen up a bit and get gritty. The camera work is all so controlled and remote; it felt like the whole damn movie was one medium shot and one wide shot. I always felt aware of the camera, and the characters were always at a "safe distance." There is so much redundancy in the camera moves, the action, and the choreography that the whole thing really lost my interest (visually) after the first hour.-Repetitive story structure. What bugged me the most about the "story" is that nothing happens or is motivated. Every "day" in the characters lives is the same; they're always sparring, or getting lectured, or standing still, and it gets old really fast. On top of that, their training is just plain dull. There's nothing at stake, and no reason for us to want them to succeed. There's ONE scene that takes place in the city, and it's the only time these characters even *remotely* feel like real people.So that's pretty much it. Overall, I think it's a wonderful tribute to the game, but apart from a few good fight scenes and spot-on imagery, everything else in this productions feels sterile, limited, and unmotivated. Maybe it works better watching it 21-minutes at a time, but I find it hard to believe it would be much more intriguing that way.Check out the anime series instead- Street Fighter 2 V. It's so much more satisfying and tells a much more interesting story.

I'm an hardcore Street fighter fan and I just CAN'T BELIEVE the glorious reviews this piece of crap received here. This movie is just a plain waste of time, boring as hell and making the Van Damme movie look great. I watched it with 2 friends and we got critically bored around the 6th episode ... the series have 14 of them ... the rest was just TORTURE. No climax, here, when it stops you're left wondering if you missed something, almost no characters except for Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Gouken, predictable as hell ... no ... as ALPHA TURBO HELL' !THIS IS A NIGHTMARE. But you know, there is a light at the end of the tunnel 'cuz one great SFII movie actually exists, the ANIME released in 94 ... just check this one out instead (or watch it again if you've already seen it).

I always rate movies based on their niche, so I would not compare a fan made martial arts film inspired from a game to a Hollywood big production. Also, I've seen this as a two hours twenty minutes film, not a bunch of episodes. That being given, I enjoyed watching Assassin's Fist (even if I think the name is completely misguided) and I appreciated, as I see many others have, the strong Street Fighter feel. If you look carefully at the battle between Ken and Ryu you see a lot of the trademark game moves, which were carefully choreographed in a believable fighting scene, which I think is both commendable and very difficult.Now, the film is an origin story, it doesn't contain much fighting and it only concerns the two characters who had disappointingly identical fighting styles in the game: Ken and Ryu. You get the typical dojo Master/pupil story (Street Fighter Kids would have been a better title). I really haven't played any version of SF newer than 2, so I don't know how the mythos evolved in the game, but if you think about it, this is not really a film inspired by the game, but by the small text boxes explaining who each character was :)In conclusion: the acting and directing were not perfect, but if you look at the cast, you realize that they did a decent job for their experience. The story is a little frustrating, given that every "master" in it is concealing and even destroying information rather than sharing it with his pupils, in order to "protect" them, fact which of course leaves them completely powerless against certain "dark" techniques. It also ends in a sort of cliffhanger, which sucked. But the spirit of the film was really close to what I would think of a Street Fighter game. I enjoyed watching it and at the end I wanted to see the continuation.Then again, I thought the VanDamme movie was OK, too. The only strong problem I see with this model of Street Fighter movies is that if you make so much effort to describe the origin of just two characters, we will get to see a tournament film somewhere in 2050. Personally I can't wait to see a Blanka bit, though.