STREET FIGHTER (2026) Review

Review

I, like many now in their 30’s and 40’s, feverishly button bashed my way through hours of Street Fighter video games as a kid. However, I have also sat through enough video game adaptations to know that rarely does cinema capture anything close to the gaming experience.

I went into Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter cautiously optimistic, after trailers showcased an exceptional recreation of the games aesthetic and a larger than life tone that would at least make for some entertaining moments. What Sakurai and his magnificent menagerie of an ensemble cast delivered vastly surpassed my expectations and showed an understanding, not just of the source material, but of those who grew up playing the games. Iconic 90’s music, era-appropriate humour and connotations of the visual media of the time colour this film with all the frantic and chaotic manner of an enthusiastic kid with their crayons.

When I took this observation to Sakurai in our interview, he beamed- “for me, I just wanted to reflect the fun of the game and the fun of that feeling in the 90’s, when 90’s movies were coming out- when movies felt fearless” . Sakurai cited Bladerunner specifically as a visual touch point and continued- “I wanted to make a movie that was colourful, vivid, in the way the games are vivid”.

What’s really impressive is how Street Fighter is chocked so full of fan service, easter eggs and perfect recreations of iconic gaming visuals, but it never feels like shallow nostalgia bait. It’s undoubtedly a film for fans, but it’s also a potential entry point into the Street Fighter franchise for new audiences.

There are moments of genuine heart amidst the action and humour, the driving force of the film is the fractured relationship between Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo). In what is possibly the movie’s boldest choice, Ken and Ryu’s history is shown by way of hand-drawn anime-style flashbacks, created by Chris and Shannon Prynoski’s production company, Titmouse.

These do more than offer a knowing tip of the cap to Gisaburō Sugii’s 1994 Street Fighter animated movie, they give this brand new film another fantastical element and a dynamism that really fortifies the hyper reality throughout the film, sewing together animation and live action seamlessly. One informs the other, in that, the animated flashbacks contextualise the ridiculous and absurd, grounding the gravity and physics defying moves on show, that in similar live-action productions may well risk breaking the illusion and eliciting a scoff from audience members.

Another interesting element of the movie is it’s huge ensemble multi-discipline cast. Martial-artists, pop-stars, comedians, podcasters, wrestlers, UFC fighters- I asked Kitao Sakuri just how important it is to have this broad array of professional experiences: “That’s Street Fighter, that’s the game! It’s a crazy eclectic cast of weirdos from all around the world, so we needed to take a similar approach and not just have a very straight down the middle cast, we needed atheletes, musicians and a just bunch of crazy people who reflect how the game feels!”

Noah Centineo’s Ken’s brash, larger than life, crass and at times, South Park-esqe humour is perfectly juxtaposed by Andrew Koji’s stoicism and seriousness as Ryu, in a dynamic that somehow feels very believable, despite being so out there. Callina Lang is mesmerising as Chun-Li, bringing pixels to life perfectly. Somehow larger than life individuals, famous for pursuits outside of acting, like 50-cent, Cody Rhodes, Eric Andre and Andrew Schultz, disappear into their characters, the world created around them and it’s aesthetic seemingly absorbing the absurdity of this unlikely collection of characters. There wasn’t a single performance that wasn’t in synergy to the tone set by their leader, a huge success for casting, in what could have been make-or-break for the movie.

In researching for reviewing the movie, I also discovered Sakurai has his own eclectic experiences of the industry, starting acting as a child, featuring in the Kevin Smith cult classic, Dogma– but more importantly, he has a history of directing music videos that undoubtedly paid dividends when constructing the unique tone of this movie- each fight feels as much it’s own music video, as it does a round of retro gaming. Kitao Sakurai’s experience with surrealist and absurd humour is of course a strong influence, but much as is represented in the aforementioned cast, Sakurai’s eclectic experience across different roles, formats and genres, is what was “needed” to bring this movie to life and hold together this production.

It maintains it’s zero pretence, campy weirdness all the way to the final battle, scene-to-scene, fight-to-fight, Street Fighter moves at a toe-tapping speed that keeps your attention. Delivering the plot in the kind of depth you could expect from a super solid Saturday morning cartoon of the era. All the pace of an episode of Power Rangers and the scale of the wildest of child-like imagination.

However, once we get to the final act and climax of the film it felt like struggles to wind down without coming to an abrupt and surprising stop. In seemingly gearing up for an sequel, I was fooled into thinking there would be one last larger-than-life battle, but ultimately I was left disappointed. It’s possibly a sign of just how into the film I was and how the pace was carrying me along, but it did feel a little underwhelming as a finishing point for what had been a frantic-fast-paced-fever-dream for an hour and fifty nine minutes.

Verdict

Street Fighter is a ferociously loyal adaptation that creates it’s own unique tone by successfully embracing the silly over serious. It delicately tiptoes the trap of being shallow nostalgia bait, leaning into the comedic, surreal and absurd to create a hyper-reality that feels like a high octane, relentlessly fun love letter to the 90’s and retro gaming.

⭐⭐⭐⭐