TL;DR: Great fights and gorgeous anime flashbacks can’t rescue Street Fighter from a messy script, cringeworthy jokes, wasted characters and a tournament the movie keeps forgetting about. Perfect combos, terrible storyline.
Adapting Street Fighter should be the cinematic equivalent of button-mashing on easy mode. You’ve got a globe-trotting roster of beloved weirdos, a villain who dresses like a military parade exploded, and a plot that basically writes itself: people enter tournament, people punch each other, people yell their special moves. Director Kitao Sakurai’s version drops us into 1993, where former best buds Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) are still nursing emotional bruises from a nasty encounter with Akuma (Joe Anoa’i) six years earlier. M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) then throws a World Warrior tournament, Interpol agent Chun-Li (Callina Liang) goes undercover to take him down and avenge her father, and Bison sets his sights on Ryu’s mysterious power. On paper, that’s a perfectly good arcade cabinet of a story.
Then the screenplay, co-written by Sakurai and T. J. Fixman, grabs the joystick and wanders off to explore the menus. The tournament, aka the entire reason this franchise exists, gets treated like an annoying tutorial you’re forced to sit through before the “real” plot about Bison’s supernatural schemes and Ryu’s destiny. Grudges get set up and then abandoned like a save file you’ll never load again, and matchups fans have been dreaming about for decades get trimmed to highlight reels or skipped entirely. Even the 1995 Mortal Kombat, a movie that featured Christopher Lambert’s eyebrows as a major special effect, understood that the bracket is the whole point. This Street Fighter movie keeps pressing start and then never actually picking a fight.
The roster is stacked, but nobody leaves the character select screen
Credit where it’s due: Koji is a rock-solid Ryu, all quiet intensity and real martial arts credibility, and Centineo has a blast playing Ken as the guy who definitely owns a sports car and wants you to know about it. Their bromance-gone-sour is the film’s best shot at a heart. Liang is a physical powerhouse in Chun-Li’s action scenes, though her dialogue lands like someone reading the back of a game box aloud. Dastmalchian, bless him, absolutely understands that Bison should be maximum ham with extra cheese. The script just never gives him a scheme clear enough to make anyone sweat.
The supporting cast is where the movie turns into a very expensive cosplay convention. Jason Momoa’s Blanka, Cody Rhodes’ Guile, Orville Peck’s Vega, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s Balrog and Olivier Richters’ Zangief show up, strike a pose, and then mostly hover in the background like unlockable characters you never bothered to unlock. A couple get a brief moment to flex a signature move, which is fun for roughly three seconds. For a franchise where fans will fight you in the comments over Guile’s sonic boom charge time, that’s borderline criminal.
The jokes keep whiffing, and there’s no block button
The dialogue is the movie’s final boss, and it wins every round. Characters constantly announce who they are and what they want, like NPCs who only have one line and refuse to stop saying it. Despite all that talking, nobody grows: Ryu broods, Ken swaggers, Chun-Li seethes, and that’s the whole skill tree. A fighting game can get away with that because you’re busy playing it. A two-hour movie cannot.
Then there’s the comedy, which leans so hard on juvenile innuendo it feels like the script was punched up by a group chat of thirteen-year-olds. I’d happily have taken a film that went full camp and owned the gloriously silly fact that one of these people is a green electric man from the Brazilian jungle. The 1994 Van Damme movie stumbled into cult classic status precisely because it was ridiculous with a straight face. This one keeps interrupting its own serious moments with gags that miss, so it never commits to being either a proper martial arts drama or a knowing comedy.
When the fists fly, it’s genuinely Hadouken-good
Now for the good news: the fight choreography absolutely rips. The moment everyone stops talking, the movie snaps into focus with crisp, committed action that clearly respects how these characters move and hit. Signature styles and special abilities are translated with real flair, and the performers sell every impact like they’ve got a health bar on the line. These scenes deliver that delicious feeling of nailing a perfect combo in Street Fighter 6 after an hour of losing online. They also make it even more maddening that the film keeps benching the tournament.
The other MVP is the anime-style flashback sequences, overseen by animation supervisor Young Heller. They’re bold, stylish and emotionally punchy, perfectly suited to a world where people casually throw fireballs out of their palms. Honestly, they gave me strong Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie flashbacks, which is the highest compliment I can give. They don’t fix the script, but they make a very persuasive case that this whole thing should have been animated.
A 90s mixtape with a broken calendar and an ending that’s basically DLC
The soundtrack serves up some fun 90s energy, but the film’s grip on its own 1993 setting is shakier than Dan Hibiki’s fighting stance. The Offspring’s “Come Out and Play” came out in 1994, which is a small cheat, but giving Ken a 2000 Baha Men “Who Let the Dogs Out” entrance is a time-travel crime worthy of its own Street Fighter stage. As a joke, it’s funny. As a sign of how carefully this movie was put together, it’s less funny.
At 119 minutes, the pacing feels like playing arcade mode with the round timer switched off. Plotlines get set up and forgotten, characters disappear for long stretches, and the fights that should justify the runtime fly by. Without spoiling anything, the ending is far more interested in teasing a sequel than wrapping up this chapter. That’s a bold “continue?” screen for a game most people will be happy to quit.
Verdict
Street Fighter brings stellar fight choreography, a well-cast Ryu and Ken, a gleefully hammy Bison and anime flashbacks that steal the whole show. Unfortunately, a clunky script, cringe humour, a criminally underused roster and draggy pacing knock it down far too often. Die-hard fans may enjoy it on streaming with friends and plenty of snacks for the action alone. Everyone else is better off firing up the games and picking their main.
