October 15, 2026 · Watch the official trailer
Poor action movies are easy to spot. They have no real sense of purpose other than to give audiences a sense of exhilaration through daring stunts, high-impact, bone-crushing hits, gunfire, and explosions that thrill viewers in a relatively cheap, easy-to-please way. It's clear when a film isn't really trying to be more than its most basic version, as viewers can see all the care put into each action sequence, with very loose concepts of a story woven in afterward to stitch the whole thing together.
“Street Fighter,” based on the classic Capcom arcade fighting game, is a perfect example of a movie whose concept came from deciding which fights to place where and building a story around them. Written and directed by Kitao Sakurai, with T.J. Fixman sharing screenplay credit, it is a very simplistic, repetitive narrative that follows former friends Ken and Ryu as they seek to win a world fighting competition put together by the power-hungry Lord Bison.
The film grounds itself in the 1993 aesthetic of “Super Street Fighter II,” though flashback sequences set in 1987 are expertly animated in a visual style that probably should have made up the entire film.
“Street Fighter” opens with a hand-drawn anime sequence, providing a prologue to the story and its supernatural, mythic battle between good and evil. While this may seem jarring at first to audiences familiar with the film's theatrical trailers, there's a very dark beauty in the cinematography of the animation that belies just how bland and ineffectual the live-action sequences of “Street Fighter” are to become. It's a bold choice from Sakurai that really pays off and ties in thematically with the Japanese roots of the franchise.
Once audiences are transported to the film's present day, it becomes a sophomoric nostalgia grab that often delves just this side of caricature, trying to evoke a sense of wonder and reminiscence of the 1990s era in a similar way that the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films pull off for the 1970s and 1980s, but far less successfully because the comedic humor just isn't there.
Hiding behind a bleach-blond wig, “To All the Boys I've Loved Before” star Noah Centineo is doing his best interpretation of a surfer-stoner version of Brad Pitt, making his Ken a lazy, washed-up spokesman for soft drinks. As a fighter on the tail end of his career, he's meant to carry most of the levity in each scene. Centineo's strengths as a rom-com star don't transition over into action-adventure, as his charms read as fake and inauthentic, especially with line deliveries of jokes that the actor clearly doesn't fully get.
Conversely, Andrew Koji is evoking a Keanu Reeves-like inner stoicism and sense of peace as Ryu, but this comes across in the film as so stilted and cold that interactions between Ken and Ryu don't land in the two-sides-of-the-same-coin theme that Sakurai clearly attempts to create.
The film's supporting cast mostly remains unmemorable, with professional wrestlers Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns acting so stiffly in their line delivery that they're clearly uncomfortable playing roles outside of themselves. David Dastmalchian is engaging in limited screen time as Lord Bison, though, typical of most action film villains, he's so comically underwritten and caricaturish that his Bison feels like a loose ripoff of Jim Carrey's Dr. Robotnik from the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie franchise.
Plenty of screen time and narrative weight is given to manosphere podcaster Andrew Schulz as Ken's best friend, Dan Hibiki. While the comedian does seem to have more acting chops than the majority of his fellow castmates, the jokes in which he's involved border so closely on the edge between homoerotic and homophobic that moments meant for big laughs become exceptionally cringeworthy.
Aside from the superb animation, the only elements that audiences will likely remember after leaving theaters are the film's numerous fight sequences. While each is shot and staged in such a manner as to highlight specific video game references from the franchise, there's no cohesion between them. Characters are inserted into “Street Fighter” just for one or two sequences, as if audiences are simply choosing a new fighter to play with. Sakurai leans so heavily into creating opportunities for more and more visual Easter eggs that it interrupts the flow of the film, especially in the final act.
There are small moments within the fight scenes where the live-action filmmaking makes sense, especially in an early fight between Ken and Ryu, where Ken's clumsiness is expertly played off for comedic laughs. Shooting in live action also allows Sakurai to make the world of “Street Fighter” three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional on a screen, like in a traditional video game, as characters are able to interact with the world around them and pivot and rotate rather than simply moving forwards and backwards.
Ardent fans of the video game franchise may find this to be an easy, lightly comic take on the series that could become a cult classic in years to come, though there's nothing about “Street Fighter” that makes it worth casual audiences spending their time heading to the movies.
Leave a Reply