If you’re a fan of the game, you’ll enjoy it. If you aren’t, you might find it to be a dumb movie.
The creative team behind the 2026 adaptation of this iconic fighting game franchise really wants you to have fun, and you can tell they truly love the source material.
If you’re a gamer, especially since the ‘90s and 2000s, you know that one of the biggest problems we have is that film studios, directors, and scriptwriters just can’t seem to fully port over a story from one visual medium to another. A lot of times, gamers just want to see the story and the world they were playing in the video game to unfold the same way on a movie or TV screen.
Street Fighter has had plenty of attempts at this. People still talk about the 1994 live-action version with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia, but that was more of a bad reimagining that only became a cult classic by accident. And honestly, it is probably best if we don’t even talk about the 2009 movie, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, either.
Sure, there have been anime and cartoon adaptations, but they are decades old and follow so many different paths that a reboot is long overdue.
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A movie that knows it’s about a video game
With a blank slate to work with, director Kitao Sakurai (Bad Trip, The Eric Andre Show) has reimagined the Street Fighter canon. As a kid of the 90s himself, he tells the story exactly how an old-school gamer would remember it: full of humor, campy, over-the-top fights, and a deep respect for how Capcom originally designed the game.
Let’s be real, nobody actually remembers the complicated plot or the deep themes of the games. For Millennials and Gen X, Street Fighter is about playing two-player mode with friends, smashing cars in bonus stages for extra points, and seeing those ridiculously attractive characters.
Because of that, the movie only needs a loose plot to get the fighting started, but Sakurai still treats the story with respect. The events of the first game play out in an animated prologue before the movie jumps into the early ‘90s, which is the same era as Street Fighter II, the most famous entry in the series.
The evil dictator M. Bison (David Dalmastchian) is looking to increase his power, so he sets up the second World Warrior Tournament. His plan is to gather the world’s strongest fighters and steal their life force to boost his own Psycho Power. Specifically, he is hunting for Ryu (Andrew Koji), the winner of the first tournament in 1987, because he wants Ryu’s Hado power. The catch is that Ryu has gone into hiding after briefly tapping into that dark energy and losing himself to the dark side.
There are plenty of other subplots happening, too. Ryu’s training partner and brother figure, Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), is searching for him while dealing with his own fading fame. Chun-Li (Callina Liang) is working undercover within Bison’s ranks to take him down, and Akuma (Joe Roman Reigns Anoa’i), the evil brother of Ryu’s sensei Gouken (Ma Dong-Seok), is also hunting for that Hado power.
Fanservice, ultimate edition
The thing about Street Fighter is that it knows it has to deliver on fanservice, meaning it has to give the fans exactly what they want.
Fans want to see the things previous adaptations missed, like accurate character designs (think Guile’s iconic blonde hair), special moves that look exactly like they do in the game, and nods to catchphrases and bonus levels. Every time a fan recognizes something, the movie wins, because the plot is really just a suggestion.
In fact, if you try to complain about the storytelling, the movie might as well ask why you’re even here. It’s clearly meant for hardcore fans and ’90s kids.
If there is any real criticism to be made, it’s that this would have worked better as a TV series with five or eight episodes. It does a great job setting up the stakes and backstories for Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and M. Bison, but the two-hour runtime feels cramped, causing some of those threads to unravel by the end. In a way, it feels like a fighting game where you can play multiple routes, but only one ending is actually canon.
So, the verdict is pretty simple. It comes down to one question: are you a Street Fighter fan? If you are, you’ll enjoy this, provided you’re willing to just soak in the references. If you aren’t, you might find it to be a dumb movie that’s hard to sit through, especially if you want a deep, intellectual experience.
But it is still a win, because if anything, Sakurai proves with Street Fighter that it’s possible after all to make a video game movie that not only respects, but really loves its source material, following decades of studio-driven, watered-down depictions. All that’s left to do now is to perfect the process.
Street Fighter is showing in cinemas across the Philippines.
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