Street Fighter: The Movie (2026) - When the Script Needs a Fatality
Street Fighters Ryu and Ken reunite when Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. As they face a hidden conspiracy, they must confront each other and their past-or face destruction.
There was a time when walking into an arcade with five dollars in quarters felt like entering the Roman Colosseum, except the gladiators wore karate uniforms, the lions shot electricity, and the guy standing beside you smelled like a combination of Doritos and teenage desperation. Street Fighter II was a glorious exercise in button-mashing violence, where friendships were tested, controllers were abused, and everybody knew at least one obnoxious kid who could beat you using nothing but Chun-Li's legs.
So when Hollywood announced another Street Fighter movie, I figured we were either getting a nostalgic knockout or another cinematic uppercut to the family jewels.
Turns out we got a little of both, although the family jewels definitely took the bigger hit.
Directed by Kitao Sakurai, Street Fighter takes us back to 1993, when Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), two estranged fighters with enough unresolved baggage to fill an airport carousel, are reunited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang). She's recruiting them for the World Warrior Tournament, where the world's toughest combatants are supposed to settle their differences through the ancient diplomatic tradition of kicking each other unconscious.
Sounds straightforward enough, right?
Well, apparently straightforward storytelling is illegal in Hollywood these days.
Before I start swinging, let me acknowledge that there are things here worth appreciating. Some of the action sequences are genuinely entertaining. When the fists start flying and the movie remembers it's based on a fighting game, there's some decent choreography, recognizable moves, and enough physical punishment to make a chiropractor consider early retirement.
The filmmakers also deserve credit for throwing some nostalgic bones to longtime fans. Familiar characters, costumes, signature attacks, and little visual callbacks remind us why the franchise became an arcade phenomenon in the first place.
For brief moments, I was transported back to those glorious days of standing in front of a glowing arcade cabinet, convinced that pressing the punch button harder would somehow make my character stronger.
Unfortunately, nostalgia can only carry a movie so far before the screenplay starts dragging it into traffic.
Let's begin with the World Warrior Tournament.
You know, the tournament that serves as the central premise of the movie.
The tournament that brings all these legendary fighters together.
The tournament that should provide the perfect excuse for a series of spectacular, escalating battles.
So why in the name of Jean-Claude Van Damme's stretching routine don't we actually get to experience a proper tournament?
I came to watch fighters battle their way through an organized competition, not wander through a narrative obstacle course that treats its own premise like an optional side quest. Imagine buying tickets to the Stanley Cup playoffs only to discover that the entire game has been replaced by two hours of locker-room arguments and somebody explaining the history of the Zamboni.
Speaking of arguments, can we discuss the dialogue?
Good grief.
I've heard more convincing conversations between two malfunctioning GPS systems.
Some of these lines are delivered with such breathtaking seriousness that I genuinely wondered how the actors managed to get through a take without collapsing into laughter. There's dramatic dialogue, there's cheesy dialogue, and then there's dialogue that sounds like somebody fed a martial arts instruction manual into a blender with a rejected Saturday morning cartoon script.
The actors deserve hazard pay for keeping straight faces.
And that's particularly frustrating because this isn't a cast entirely devoid of talent.
Andrew Koji has the physical presence and martial arts credibility to make Ryu convincing. Noah Centineo brings pizazz to Ken, while Callina Liang looks comfortable handling Chun-Li's athletic demands. Surrounding them is a bizarrely entertaining collection of wrestlers, comedians, musicians, and actors, including Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes, 50 Cent, and Jason Momoa.
It's the sort of casting lineup you'd expect if someone accidentally merged a WWE event, a Hollywood premiere, and a celebrity charity boxing match.
Yet despite all those recognizable faces, the movie struggles to give them a coherent story.
And then there's the genre confusion.
What exactly am I watching?
One minute it's a martial arts tournament movie. Then it veers into a post-apocalyptic nightmare, takes a wrong turn into science fiction, flirts with conspiracy thriller territory, and suddenly decides it wants to be a comedy.
By the time the movie settles into another personality, I'm still recovering from the previous one.
It's like watching five different directors fight over the remote control while the screenwriter hides behind the couch.
I'm not opposed to mixing genres. Some of the best movies manage it beautifully. But there's a difference between blending ingredients into a delicious meal and throwing everything in the refrigerator into a cement mixer.
Street Fighter occasionally resembles the latter.
And then we have M. Bison.
Oh, Bison. What have they done to you?
David Dastmalchian is an interesting actor, and under different circumstances I could see him delivering a wonderfully sinister villain. But this interpretation of Bison feels less like a terrifying criminal mastermind and more like an incompetent middle manager who somehow inherited an evil empire.
Bison is supposed to be intimidating. He's supposed to command respect through fear, power, and ruthless ambition.
Instead, I kept expecting somebody to hand him a clipboard and tell him his probationary period wasn't working out.
There's a fine line between making a villain entertaining and turning him into the office idiot. This movie doesn't just cross that line. It performs a flying kick over it.
Which brings me to Jason Momoa as Blanka.
Now here's a casting decision that should have been a gift wrapped in green body paint.
Momoa is an enormous human being. The man looks like he was assembled from spare Viking parts and fed a steady diet of protein shakes and conquered civilizations.
Why, then, did we need Blanka looking like a questionable CGI experiment?
I understand the character has exaggerated physical features and electrical abilities, but surely there's a practical-effects approach that could have made better use of Momoa's imposing physique. Instead, some of the digital work looks cheap, distracting, and strangely disconnected from the physical presence of the actor underneath it.
It's particularly disappointing considering Momoa's personal affection for the character. He's reportedly a longtime Street Fighter II fan, with Blanka being his favorite fighter, and even owns an arcade cabinet at home to play with his son.
That's a terrific connection to the material, which makes the final visual result all the more puzzling.
Hollywood had a gigantic, enthusiastic actor who genuinely loved the character, and somehow decided the answer was to make him look like an expensive video game cutscene that hadn't finished rendering.
What frustrates me most about Street Fighter isn't that it's completely terrible.
It's that the ingredients for something genuinely entertaining were sitting right there.
You've got a beloved franchise, recognizable characters, a talented physical cast, decades of nostalgia, and a premise practically begging for spectacular tournament battles.
Nobody was demanding Shakespeare with spinning kicks.
Give me a straightforward competition, some entertaining rivalries, a villain worth fearing, and enough outrageous martial arts action to make my knees hurt just watching it.
Instead, the movie tries so hard to be several different things that it never becomes particularly good at any of them.
There's still some enjoyment to be found, especially when the fighting takes centre stage. Diehard fans may appreciate the callbacks, and casual viewers looking for noisy, ridiculous entertainment might find enough here to justify the popcorn.
But the more I thought about what this movie could have been, the more disappointed I became.
Sometimes the smartest thing a filmmaker can do is recognize what made the original material successful and get out of its way.
Street Fighter didn't need reinvention. It needed focus.
My Rating: 5.0/10. Street Fighter lands a few respectable punches with its action and nostalgic references, but an incoherent story, laughable dialogue, a disappointing M. Bison, and questionable CGI leave it stumbling around the ring looking for its corner. It's not a complete knockout disaster, but it's certainly no championship contender. Half the movie works, half the movie doesn't, and somewhere in the middle sits a perfectly good fighting tournament wondering why nobody invited it to the party. GAME OVER.
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