The live-action 2026 Street Fighter movie is pretty much what gas station drugs would be in cinematic form
The new Street Fighter movie is an odd duck. It’s a rare movie that succeeds and fails by being TOO faithful to its source material. And what works when you’re shoving quarters into an arcade machine doesn’t necessarily translate to the cinematic medium all that well.
I guess the first question anybody would ask is whether the newest Street Fighter is better than the 1994 live-action Street Fighter (which speaks volumes about how utterly forgettable The Legend of Chun Li was.) Well, I’m not sure I’d classify it as “better,” per se, but it’s not really any worse, either. At least with the Jean Claude movie they tried to turn it into a real movie with a real plot, even if it meant screwing up the franchise mythology pretty bad. This movie, though, oftentimes plays out just like a live action version of the beloved fighting video game classic. Which, in a triply ironic way, is the core problem of the entire film.
It’s not that Street Fighter ‘26 is too kinetic. It’s that it’s too inconsequential in being so damned kinetic. There’s never enough time for the severity of things to kick in. It’s basically old school Looney Tunes violence for two hours, where people get maimed, mutilated and eviscerated … only to come back to the fold practically scratch-less five minutes later. Who’d thought you could survive getting piledriven through a sedan so effortlessly?
Structurally the movie does follow the video game canon quite well. Just like in the arcade title, Ken and Ryu are our dual protagonists. Ryu is a man of the shadows who inexplicably gives up tournament fighting to become a pigeon stew vendor (no, really) despite being the most badass dude on the entire planet, while Ken has gone on to become a very Van Damme like movie star … who is constantly in crisis mode because the media doesn’t think he’s a real life tough guy.
The main villain of the film, of course, is M. Bison, played by David Dastmach … Dastmuch … Dastmalia … oh screw it, that one dude from Late Night With The Devil. He’s a wimpy dictator of some fictitious city who wants to kidnap the best fighters in the world so he can hook them up to a machine that drains them of their “psycho power.” Hot on his trail is international a spy Chun Li, who has to pretend to be an M. Bison loyalist so she can get close enough to him to avenge her father’s death. So far, it’s a pretty staid storyline … but it won’t stay that way for long.
There are far too many characters in the film. In addition to the primary four characters, we’ve got close to half a dozen subplots going on simultaneously — and to say it gets confusing is putting it mildly. Basically, they’re all associated with some sort of karate tourney where the “victor” gets soul drained by M. Bison; except none of the participants know that at the time.
Weirdly enough, the movie doesn’t really show a lot of tournament fighting fisticuffs. Pretty much all of the action scenes sans one take place in the “real world” — i.e., brawls in hotel rooms, literal street fights in a neon-colored alley, at a ritzy club, so on and so forth. Thankfully, these action sequences are pretty great and inventive, especially Ryu’s battle with Blanka (Jason Momoa, looking like a cross between Frankenstein and, well, Jason Momoa.) It’s pretty obvious where everything is headed, with Ryu eventually giving into the dark side and unleashing Akuma on an unsuspecting world. And if you’re unfamiliar with Akuma, he’s basically a ghost that’s really good at spin kicking people. Just to clarify.
It’s got the action set pieces and the lore callbacks and some occasionally witty dialogue. Half the fun of the movie is just seeing non-actors portraying some of the most iconic video game characters of all-time — Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, Hirooki Goto, UFC fighter Alexander Volkanovski, etc. And I’ll be damned if rapper 50 Cent doesn’t make a tremendous Balrog … think, an even more unhinged version of Mike Tyson.
The humor is pretty inconsistent, with some jokes landing and others missing by a couple of area codes. One thing that’ll probably rub a lot of viewers the wrong way is just how anachronistic things are. This is a movie that’s supposed to take place in 1993, with characters listening to “Who Let the Dogs Out,” a song that didn’t come out until 2000. There’s an even more egregious example in the opening scene, which is supposed to be set in 1987, where Ryu listens to a 4 Non Blondes song that doesn’t even exist for another six years. There’s a fine line between “stylized” and lazy, and this is a movie that toes it a bit too often for its own good.
The film also uses a lot of animated footage. Sometimes it works, other times it feels like a low-effort attempt to save money on live-action shots. The grand finale obviously sets up a sequel, but the third act, as a whole, is pretty ho-hum. It’s a big letdown after the first two acts set things up very well — and some of the CGI therein isn’t terribly impressive, either.
Street Fighter ‘26 isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t a bad one, either. It has its ups and downs, its triumphs and its flaws. It’s a fun movie that’s supposed to plays things firmly tongue in cheek, and that may put off some viewers looking for a more serious adaptation. It’s wild, it’s woolly, it’s uneven and it kinda leaves you wondering what just happened in the last half hour or so.
It’s not as much fun as playing the game on the Super Nintendo, but it mostly achieves what it set out to accomplish. In the “right” mind set this one will entertain you; as long as you’re not looking for profound commentary on the human condition, anyway.
