The video game movie has spent the last few years clawing its way toward respectability, with Sonic and The Super Mario Bros. Movie proving that a faithful, well-made adaptation can be both a hit and, occasionally, actually good. That progress is exactly what makes a film like the new Street Fighter so dispiriting, because it is a throwback to the bad old days, a movie that appears to have been assembled with no concern for plot, character, or craft, held together by nothing but a vague hope that brand recognition and nostalgia will carry it across the finish line. It is the rare film that seems to have been shot entirely on vibes, and the vibes are not enough. This is a one-star movie, spared a zero only by the few minutes of it that actually work.
The third live-action adaptation of Capcom’s fighting franchise, directed by Kitao Sakurai and set in 1993, Street Fighter is nominally the story of estranged martial artists Ryu and Ken, reunited by the mysterious Chun-Li to enter the World Warrior Tournament and uncover the conspiracy behind it, orchestrated by the dictator M. Bison. Andrew Koji plays Ryu, Noah Centineo plays Ken Masters, and Callina Liang, David Dastmalchian, Jason Momoa, and Roman Reigns also star. That is the plot as it can be reconstructed afterward, which is more than the film itself manages to convey while you are watching it.
The most basic failure is that the movie has no idea who its protagonist is. Is it Ken? Is it Ryu? Is it Chun-Li? The film never decides, and crucially these are not three distinct characters with their own intersecting agendas (a structure that can absolutely work) but three figures who each lack any clear sense of what they want or what is happening around them. Chun-Li in particular seems to exist almost entirely to deliver exposition for a subplot, something involving Interpol, that never materializes into anything coherent. She wants revenge on M. Bison but it is never developed beyond that. At one point the film cuts restlessly back and forth between Chun-Li convincing Ken to go rescue Ryu and an unrelated fight, for no discernible reason, as if the editing itself cannot sit still long enough to let a scene land.
The tournament is the supposed centerpiece, the whole marketing hook, and it is a shambles. This is an eight-fighter bracket in which three of the matchups are decided by forfeit, which raises the obvious question of what the point of any of it was. The sense that nothing matters is literalized by how little screen time the fights get: a trip to the restroom, under two minutes, was enough to miss an entire tournament bout in its entirety. A movie built around a fighting tournament that treats its fights as skippable throat-clearing has fundamentally misunderstood its own premise.
And then there is the choreography, which is the single most damning failure, because this is a movie called Street Fighter. Fight scenes are the one thing this film absolutely had to get right, and they are awful, visually uninspired in a way that is hard to credit in 2026, when competent, kinetic, legible action is close to a solved problem and dozens of films a year stage long, thrilling fight sequences without trouble. A prison-break sequence with Ken and Ryu that should crackle is instead the most lifeless thing imaginable. If you cannot make the fighting work in a fighting-game movie, there is no floor left to stand on.
Underneath all of it is a structural problem the film shares with Aquaman: it does not know whether it is getting a sequel, so it crams everything into one picture and short-changes all of it. There is M. Bison the evil dictator, and the demonic threat of Akuma, and the Ryu-and-Ken rivalry, and Ryu’s turn into Evil Ryu, and the Chun-Li material, and the movie services none of them because it is trying to service all of them at once. The correct move was to pick a lane. A focused film about Ryu entering this tournament, grappling with his own identity, and succumbing to the darkness of Evil Ryu before being pulled back would have been a complete, satisfying story, with the rest of the roster saved for later. Instead the movie sprints past everything and arrives, exhausted, at an ending that barely qualifies as one.
That ending is the film’s final insult, and it is a specific kind of bad. The entire movie builds Bison up as the ultimate threat everyone is circling, and then it simply stops, mid-momentum, with the real confrontation deferred. There is even a mid-film post-credits-style tease in which Akuma is brought in to be leveraged for more power, a sequel hook dropped into the middle of a movie that has not earned a first installment, let alone a second. It is the hallmark of the very worst low-budget genre filmmaking, the kind of movie that ends right as the thing you came for is about to begin, promising “next time” to an audience that has no reason to come back.
The one bright spot, and the reason this clears zero stars, is the animation. The film periodically breaks into anime sequences to deliver character backstory, and those stretches are visually striking, inventive, and alive in a way nothing in the live-action footage manages. They are good enough to make you wish the whole movie had simply been that, an animated Street Fighter film by whoever made these interludes, rather than the inert thing wrapped around them. It is a small mercy, but a real one.
The rest is the sound of a studio chasing a nostalgia blanket, hoping to catch Gen X and millennials who grew up on the arcade cabinet, and getting the one thing wrong that mattered most. The 1993 setting, presumably a nod to the era of Street Fighter II, cannot even keep its own period straight, scoring its early-nineties world with songs that would not be released for years, a detail small on its own but emblematic of a production that cared about the feeling of the thing and none of the substance. Street Fighter is a one-star movie, and the generous half-star the animation earns back is the only thing standing between it and the bottom of the barrel. Skip it, and hope the inevitable animated adaptation someday comes from the people who made the only good minutes in this one.
