The New Street Fighter Movie Misses the Knockout Blow: Review

From the beginning, there was one fight that the 2026 Street Fighter movie was always very likely to win: being the best Street Fighter movie ever made. This is because 1994’s Street Fighter and 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li are two of the worst video game adaptations of all time. Ergo, this new martial arts comedy/adventure would have had to be catastrophically bad in order not to achieve this dubious honor — and it is not catastrophically bad. It is, however, chaotic, a movie that would be described as cartoonish even if parts of it weren’t literally animated (key flashback sequences are presented as ’90s-style anime produced by Titmouse Animation). Even during the live-action sequences, multiple actors are playing things to the level of Looney Tunes mayhem, and they all look pretty much identical to their video game counterparts, even occasionally growling out their video game catchphrases. In so many respects, Street Fighter works exactly the way you want a big screen adaptation of Street Fighter to work. Making the ways it doesn’t work all the more frustrating. Plot-wise, here are the basics: In 1987, world-class martial artists/BFFs Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (N...