Street Fighter Is Heavy On The Action And Light On The Substance
This is certainly the movie fans have been waiting for, even if it isn't a knockout for the uninitiated.
With six mainline entry installments across almost 40 years (not counting spin-off titles like Marvel vs Capcom), it's a little hard to understand what the landscape of fighting games looked like before Street Fighter. Players fought to beat previously attained high scores instead of other players, attacks were stiff and lacked the input chains that we now know as “combos,” and rosters were often filled with identical clones and lacked the kind of variety we take for granted. The eclectic personality of later games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken couldn’t even be fathomed in the early days of the genre; there was a rigorous presentational formula that most, if not all, fighting games clung to.
But that all changed drastically in 1991 when Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior landed on arcade systems: It absolutely decimated the old style of fighting games like a nuclear warhead and paved the way for not just four additional sequels (and a host of ports and special editions) but a new golden era for the genre, allowing for entries like Killer Instinct and The King of Fighters. In 2026, Street Fighter is absolutely ubiquitous in pop culture, transcending games to earn two prior (critically derided) live-action adaptations and a brand new reboot from Paramount Pictures and director Kitao Sakurai. And while the film is a far cry from the revolutionary game-changer it’s based on, it’s certainly the closest any filmmaker has come to bringing the franchise’s signature verve and bombast to the big screen.
After two prior failed attempts, Street Fighter has finally abandoned the “grounded” approach to adaptation.
Fighting games aren’t particularly known for having deep, complex storytelling, and Street Fighter certainly isn’t changing that aspect just because it’s now a movie. The narrative is a perfunctory and utilitarian justification for the action spectacle the title so clearly implies: In 1987, a young Japanese fighter named Ryu (Andrew Koji) defeats the veteran combatant Sagat in the first World Warrior tournament, but in the process opens himself up to corruption by the demonic entity Akuma, who wants Ryu to embrace his inner darkness and provide a worthy challenge to Akuma. To that end, Akuma murders Gouken, the martial arts master who trained both Ryu as well as his adopted brother Ken Masters (Noah Centineo); the fact that Ryu could have stopped Gouken’s death (but perhaps at the cost of his soul) drives a wedge between the two friends, one that persists for six years.
But when the villainous crime lord M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) announces a second World Warrior tournament, Ken is recruited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) in the hopes of finally stepping out from under Ryu’s shadow — totally unaware that Akuma has already promised Ryu that he will slay whoever wins the tournament, forcing the world-renowned fighter out of early retirement. Thus arises the central conflicts of the movie: the bitter rivalry between Ryu and Ken as well as Ryu’s struggle against Akuma and the hatred lying dormant in his heart, with M. Bison lurking in the background, harboring his own ulterior motives for putting on another tournament.
The friendly rivalry between Ryu and Ken becomes the movie’s emotional backbone, and Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo’s chemistry is one of the film’s highlights.
What the film lacks in storytelling originality or depth, it mostly makes up for by recreating the idiosyncratic Saturday morning cartoon dynamism of the games. The sprawling ensemble of eclectic fighters is just one of the ways the film does this — the cast is mostly pitch-perfect (Dastmalchian is the one standout, simply unable to come across as intimidating or sinister as the film wants M. Bison to be) and actively lean into the over-the-top nature of the franchise. While Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li (who operates as a double agent for Interpol seeking vengeance on Bison for the murder of her father) are obviously the main focus and emotional center of the movie, characters like Cody Rhodes’ Guile and Andrew Schulz’s Dan Hibiki have a lot of personality in their own right and bring the necessary comedic relief to a movie that could easily gone the dour and self-serious route of 2021’s Mortal Kombat; unlike the 1994 film, screenwriters Sakurai and T.J. Fixman don’t feel the need to ground these characters either, allowing them to exist on-screen with exactly the same larger-than-life absurdity as they have in the game (look no further than 50 Cent’s atrocious haircut as the boxing henchman Balrog).
Despite only directed one feature prior as well as a host of episodes of The Eric Andre Show, Kitao Sakurai’s direction always feels kinetic and chaotic in precisely the way a fighting game adaptation should. The film is a maximalist visual feast — backstory is provided in the form of some stunning 2D animation courtesy of Titmouse (as entertaining as the cast is these sequences almost make the argument that the entire film should’ve been animated), and Sakurai matches that energy with electrifying camerawork that comes extremely close to replicating the visual language of anime on-screen.
Titmouse, the animation studio behind Scavengers Reign and Star Trek: Lower Decks, explores the film’s backstory in some beautifully animated sequences.
However, there’s one thing people are expecting to see in a Street Fighter adaptation, and that’s of course the street fighting, which is generally thrilling throughout. The film does a thoroughly engaging job of marrying bone-crunching fight choreography with computer-generated superhero-adjacent spectacle, giving each battle in the tournament personality and flavor as unique as the special moves performed by each character in-game. It’s just as much fun watching Ryu dance effortlessly around Ken’s vitriolic attacks in their first reunion as it is watching the two of them work together to beat hundreds of Bison’s guards into submission in the third act. Cinematographer Ken Seng (who shot the Blaxploitation satire They Cloned Tyrone) puts the camera and the audience dangerously close to the action, always emphasizing each kick and punch with whiplash-inducing camera movement.
For all the style on display, the film falters in the moments that are necessary to tether the spectacle together. While Ryu and Ken’s emotional arc is surprisingly satisfying (mostly due to the sincerity of Koji and Centineo’s brotherly relationship), the film’s erratic pacing fails a lot of the other characters. Callina Liang’s Chun-Li is one of the most magnetic parts of the ensemble but her revenge quest simply isn’t fleshed out enough to feel anything other than exceedingly familiar, and the script is pretty content with allowing M. Bison to be a caricature of a mustache-twirling villain (without the gravitas of Raul Julia’s shockingly elevated turn in the 1994 film). At exactly two hours it feels like some of the time spent on the movie’s numerous homoerotic gags could be better served further developing these characters, and the film’s runtime is punctuated by a cliffhanger sequel tease that leaves the climax feeling unignorably abrupt.
Despite having a wonderfully cast ensemble, the sheer amount of half-baked characters can’t help but leave the film feeling overstuffed.
Street Fighter is one of the most recognizable video game franchises on Earth, and even if the plot of the games is expectedly thin, the diverse cast of characters offers a perfect foundation for richer characterization that the movie fails to capitalize on. But despite a lack of depth under the surface, there’s still more than enough charming, crowd-pleasing spectacle and reverence for the series to please longtime fans and provide a fun time at the movies for newcomers. Street Fighter might not be a film that sticks in your brain for days afterwards, but while you’re in your seat it feels like a shot of adrenaline to the arm, the kind that you might get from hearing the coveted “You Win” announcement after the end of a hard-fought match.
