‘Street Fighter’ Review: Get Ready to Be Beaten Into Submission

If Mountain Dew directed a movie (with editing by Surge and music by Crystal Pepsi) it might look like Street Fighter. Relentless, loud, and bursting with color, it’s as much an adaptation of the Capcom fighting game as it is of the vibe of a ’90s mall arcade: Flashing lights, blaring chiptunes, and overcaffeinated people screaming at one another to be heard over the din. And like a trip to a ’90s mall arcade, Street Fighter’s pretty fun — for about 30 minutes, until the sensory overload starts to pummel your overstimulated brain into submission.

Credit where credit’s due: This movie goes for it. Unlike the ’90s Street Fighter movie, which clearly disdained its source material, the 2026 edition was made for fans by fans. It’s got most of the game’s classic cast of fighters, all in their signature costumes and hair – no matter how outlandish they might look in live-action. (Kudos to WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes for possessing the confidence and the sense of humor to rock the biggest and flattest flattop in cinema history as macho military man Guile).

At the center of them all are Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo). Former training partners and best friends, the duo have not spoken since a tragedy at the World Warrior Tournament. After an animated prologue establishes the reason for their estrangement, the story picks up six years later, when a power-mad dictator named M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) relaunches the same street fighting contest for brazenly nefarious purposes. His competition attracts top pugilists from around the globe, including stretchy-limbed Indian Dhalsim (Bollywood actor Vidyut Jammwal), claw-handed Spaniard Vega (country music star Orville Peck), and burly Russian grappler Zangief (Dutch bodybuilder Olivier Richters).

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But wait! There are many, many more! There’s also 50 Cent as the boxer Balrog, Mel Jarnson as Bison’s henchwoman Cammy, MMA star Alexander Volkanovski as Joe, and no less than three pro wrestlers — Cody Rhodes, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i, and New Japan’s Hrooki Goto —all playing different Street Fighter mainstays (Guile, Akuma, and E. Honda, respectively.) Oh and Jason Momoa voices the beastly, quirky Blanca, who looks like the Hulk’s stoner cousin and possesses electricity powers because he was raised by electric eels. (That’s a thing that happens, right?) Blanka also likes to sniff his armpits and say stuff like “Mm, smell like hot dogs.”

Momoa is not the only character to smell himself or others in Street Fighter. The script by Sakurai and T.J. Fixman (with a story credit for Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman) is big on B.O. humor, perhaps intended as another nod to those old arcades, which could get pretty funky if they weren’t properly ventilated. Or maybe it’s just part of this movie‘s broader strategy to fill the space between the fight scenes with as much weirdness as possible.

Said weirdness includes: Eric André screaming basically every one of his lines into a star-spangled microphone, Dastmalchian rolling his eyes into the back of his head as he monologues about his desire for “psycho power,” and Centineo’s Ken lugging around the ashes of his dead master and occasionally singing 4 Non Blonde’s “What’s Up?” You’ll lose track of why most of the characters care about this tournament or what’s at stake, but hey — Kyle Mooney gets a couple of chuckles as some kind of government agent with a desk job with a pathetic crush on the ferocious and beautiful Chun-Li (Callina Liang).

“What’s Up?” is hardly the only sing-along needle drop; the ironic soundtrack faves fly at the viewer nearly as fast as E. Honda’s hundred-hand slap. Street Fighter is all manic attitude. It’s self-aware enough to acknowledge the silliness baked into the Street Fighter mythology, even as it dedicates two full hours to getting as much of it onscreen as possible.

It doesn’t help that the movie is almost all set up; introducing and bringing together the enormous cast of the characters. By the time the tournament begins — and the film begins skipping multiple rounds of matches — Street Fighter begins to feel like the movie version of when you’d take a multiple-choice test in school, spend too much time solving the first five questions, and then have to rush to randomly fill in the bubbles for the last 20 answers. The film’s one-note go-for-broke freneticism gets tiresome long before Street Fighter stops and the credits roll. (Note I didn’t say it ends. It doesn’t. It simply stops.)

Everything rushes by in such a blur, it’s tough to single out highlights. There are so many characters that a lot of them fade to the background, although Roman Reigns brings an impressive amount of aggression and presence to the role of the supernaturally powered Akuma. Centineo brings a lot of rough charisma to Ken, despite spending a lot of the movie playing off Andrew Schulz as the bumbling Dan.

Street Fighter did make me smile a fair number of times. The sheer absurdity and fevered intensity of the pacing, not to mention some very athletic fight choreography, is good enough to carry things along through the jittery first act. (The best scene in the entire film is a confrontation between Ken and Ryu where the latter is trying everything he can think of not to beat up his friend and instead resorts of dodging his attacks and yanking off his socks.) But you can only mainline caffeine for so long before it starts to give you a headache.

Additional Thoughts:

-I generally sit through the closing credits of Hollywood movies out of professional obligation. (For the record, Street Fighter contains one brief mid-credits scene, and zilch after the credits.) With Street Fighter, that obligation was also a pleasure, because the end credits are backed by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson’s fist-pumping electronic score. The pair previously wrote the music for Cobra Kai, which very much tracks. If you need composers for a nostalgic action movie or show about aggro dudes with gushy hearts, they’re the men for the job.

-Maybe it’s the ’90s kid in me, but I cannot help but observe that Street Fighter’s perennial rival in arcades, Mortal Kombat, got its own movie in 2026 — and that the heroes of both films share the same backstory, the same motivation, and the same arc. Street Fighter’s Ken and Mortal Kombat II’s Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) are both famous fighters who have fallen on hard times and now resort to taking embarrassing, emasculating gigs for cash. They both enter tournaments filled with garish, mega-powerful warriors, where they must regain their own confidence and sense of self-worth as they battle their way to victory. Is there no other storyline that can ground this kind of video-game adaptation? I’ll say this right now: If they make a Primal Rage movie about an insecure raptor god who needs to rediscover his belief in himself, I quit.

RATING: 5/10