dir. Kitao Sakurai, 2026
Cast:
Noah Centineo as Ken
Andrew Koji as Ryu
David Dastmalchian as M. Bison
Callina Lang as Chun-Li
Hot on the heels of the successful Mortal Kombat reboot movies comes a new take on arch-rival Street Fighter, directed by Kitao Sakurai. The plot is familiar: the villainous M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) sets up a fighting tournament to pit the world’s best warriors against each other. But the tournament is actually a ruse intended to lure in former champion Ryu (Andrew Koji) and steal his mystical “hado” power. Ryu is facing his own demons, literally, in the form of Akuma (Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i) who’s poised to tempt him to the Dark Side if he unleashes his full power; an intervention from his adopted brother Ken (Noah Centineo), now a washed-up martial artist putting on tacky entertainment shows, forces him to return, playing right into Bison’s hands.
The tournament is so much of a ruse that the movie decides we don’t need to see most of it, and so the big flashy demonstration for most of the classic Street Fighter II roster happens in a bar brawl. Cody Rhodes as Guile is especially hard done by: he gets to pull off one flash kick, but his big fight against Vega takes place - bewilderingly - offscreen, and he doesn’t even manage a Sonic Boom. The rest of the supporting cast embody their characters well: Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim and Hirooki Goto as E. Honda particularly impress with their physicality. Jason Momoa, who turns up later on as Blanka, is the only one who doesn’t seem to fit; it feels like he wanted to repeat his supporting performance from Supergirl, but there’s no real reason why he has to be playing Blanka here (and indeed, Eric Andre was initially cast as him before Momoa stepped in; Andre gets to play ring announcer Don Sauvage instead); his appearance, buried inside a mountain of green CGI, is little more than a cameo.
By far the best acting in the movie comes from Koji as Ryu, who plays the role almost completely straight: he’s a breath of fresh air compared to Centineo’s buffoon of a Ken, and should have been the focus of the movie from the start. Bison is fantastic, too; although there’s shades of Dastmalchian’s insecure-with-hidden-depths characterisation that we’ve seen from him in movies like The Suicide Squad, he plays Bison like a sadistic, creepy cult leader rather than a ranting supervillain, and his offbeat humour threatens to steal the show on multiple occasions. The animated prologue and flashbacks are thrilling, and there’s been many an opinion that the whole movie should have been produced as an animation; the hyper-kinetic combat carries across to the live-action fight scenes, which are the best part of the movie. The prison break sequence in particular is just the right blend of breathtaking stuntwork and Deadpool-style action comedy.
The movie’s editing is chaotic and often nonsensical: rapid cuts from the half-abandoned tournament plot, straight to Dastmalchian’s Bison vamping at the camera with underling Cammy (Mel Jarnson), then to the prison break scene, with nothing joining them together. The two main plotlines, and two villains, constantly conflict with each other: I haven’t yet mentioned Chun-Li (Callina Liang), who gets her own sub-subplot as an undercover agent trying to take down Bison, and yet the constantly switching focus back to Ryu, Ken and the lurking Akuma undermines it completely. By the time Akuma shows up, and Bison has made his exit, nothing except for the core Ryu / Ken plot even matters any more.
I was expecting a lot more from Street Fighter, based on the trailers, which suggested that the producers were going to lean into the silliness of the setting and the over-the-top nature of the characters. It worked for Mortal Kombat II earlier in the year, which swiftly ditched the first movie’s original protagonist in favour of more over-the-top video game style action, but maintained a core cast of likeable characters with their own backstories and motivations. But with a couple of exceptions, the cast of Street Fighter are content to be simple caricatures, lacking depth and existing only as action figures in a make-believe world. It’s not that I wanted to see a serious, respectful gritty take on the Street Fighter lore either, but when the characters themselves don’t seem to care about anything they’re doing, it feels like the movie is taking its audience for granted: like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, it assumes that throwing a few recognisable special moves and music cues onto the screen will keep the fans engaged, and doesn’t need to be a half-decent movie on top of that.
A movie that’s all style and no substance can succeed and be an enjoyable experience just on its face, but it has to be able to take itself seriously when called for: otherwise, how can the audience be expected to indulge it? Street Fighter, like Masters of the Universe before it, takes the misguided route of self-deprecating, self-referential humour, embracing its own stupidity a bit too tightly and making fun of itself so much that it’s impossible to really care about why anything is happening. If a sequel does happen - and the producers seem to treat it as inevitable, leaving the final fight with Bison himself as a sequel hook - I’d like to see a bit more care taken to make sure the iconic World Warriors have something worth fighting for.
