I remember playing Street Fighter with my friends in video arcades, marveling at the characters, visuals, and over-the-top fun. Fast-forward to 2026, when we have a new film based on the game, the third attempt to get it right, yet somehow the powers that be still don’t fully grasp the assignment.
The film is nice to look at and loads of fun, but it has too many weird edits and characters. The two-hour run time can be a bit of a slog, making the film a disappointment in the end.
Let’s start with the good. Director and co-writer Kitao Sakurai focuses on the film’s visuals. The film looks great, a smorgasbord of ’80s-style visuals that feel very authentic to the game. Hand in hand with Ken Seng’s cinematography wizardry are solid action and fight scenes. It gives fans throwbacks to moves, sounds, one-liners, and fight styles, with a bit of modernization, of course. These two things are important and, together, help create the right vibe, advancing the movie’s quest to entertain.
Noah Centineo leads the cast as Ken Masters, with Andrew Koji as Ryu. They are brothers whose relationship has fractured amid the circumstances surrounding their master, Gouken (Don Lee), the film’s cornerstone.
After six years apart, Ryu finds himself in hiding, selling noodles, while Masters is a washed-up celebrity hawking any product to try to stay relevant. They return to each other’s orbit when a new tournament is announced, following the first World Warrior Tournament, which led to Gouken’s mysterious death and the rift between the brothers.
The new tournament, where Chun-Li (Callina Liang) has assembled the best fighters to host M.Bison (David Dastmalchian, who chews through some awful dialogue like a pro), features intriguing personalities. Guile (the surprisingly funny Cody Rhodes), Balrog (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), Vega (Orville Peck), Zangief (Olivier Richters), and Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal) are among the fighters and characters popping in and out of the film.
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However, as much fun as they are at times, there are so many characters that scenes feel rushed or edited together in chopped-up pieces. This disrupts the movie’s flow far too often.
On that note, a couple of characters fall at opposite ends of the spectrum in the film. Blanka, played by Jason Momoa, gets far too little screen time, especially when his character could have been so much more than what we’re given. Then there’s Dan Hibiki (Andrew Schulz), who essentially serves as Ken Masters’ best buddy and gets plenty of screen time—a head-scratcher, given how little he adds to the film overall.
The core of the film is the relationship between Ken and Ryu. Actors Centineo and Koji do a pretty good job portraying them. They are all on board with the silliness of their characters, as most of the actors are, and they deliver some great fight scenes, too. The problem lies in how they resolve the big issues between them. Some scenes feel shoehorned into the film so they can discuss feelings, reveal all the secrets, and become family again.
As with most of the film’s editing, it feels oddly put together, as though it’s stitched together the wrong way. While at times it adds to the on-screen mayhem, more often than not it just feels off.
Saying all that, even with the clumsy ending that left the door wide open for a sequel, Street Fighter was still a fun time at the movies. Could it have been better? Sure. Were there too many characters, which led to some bizarre edits and screen-time issues? Absolutely. But in the end, with the actors fully on board, it made most of this two-hour frenzy of a film a fun time.
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