Street Fighter (2026) Review: All Hadouken, No Heart — Game-Accurate Moves Can't Save a Script That Forgets to Finish Its Own Story

Director Kitao Sakurai's live-action reboot splits critics right down the middle: some call it bottom-drawer cinema, others a vibrant, game-accurate knockout let down by its own bloated plot.

Street Fighter picks up six years after Ryu won the first World Warrior tournament in 1987, an act that awakened the demon Akuma. When the warlord M. Bison launches a second tournament to harvest Ryu's power for himself, Chun-Li — undercover as an Interpol agent — recruits Ryu, Ken Masters, and a roster of familiar fighters to stop him. Noah Centineo plays Ken, Andrew Koji plays Ryu, Callina Liang plays Chun-Li, and David Dastmalchian takes on M. Bison, with Jason Momoa as Blanka, 50 Cent as Balrog, Roman Reigns as Akuma, and Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim rounding out a genuinely stacked cast for a video-game adaptation.

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Where the reviews actually agree

Every review of this film, favorable or brutal, lands on the same two names: Andrew Koji and Callina Liang. FictionMachine's Grant Watson, in an otherwise scorched-earth pan, singles out Koji's Ryu as a genuine bright spot and calls Liang's Chun-Li a "valiant performance" carrying scenes the script doesn't earn. Casey's Movie Mania's review, considerably more forgiving overall, makes the same split: Koji's "stoic Ryu" working well against Centineo's looser, more carefree Ken, with Liang bringing "grounded energy" to Chun-Li. When critics on opposite ends of a rating scale single out the same two performances, that's usually the most reliable signal in a mixed review cycle — whatever else is wrong with this movie, the two leads carrying its emotional core aren't it.

The case for it

Casey's Movie Mania's review makes the strongest positive case: the fight choreography is "clear and well-executed without shaky cam or rapid editing," a real and specific compliment given how often modern action movies hide mediocre fight work behind fast cuts. The film's visual style gets singled out too — a "vibrant and colourful," "retro-cool neon-soaked aesthetic" — and the review praises how the effects team integrates signature game moves like the Hadouken, Shoryuken, and helicopter kick directly into the choreography rather than treating them as separate CGI set pieces bolted onto generic fight scenes. An animated, 1987-set prologue sequence gets called out as a particularly promising opening note, and the soundtrack's nostalgic 90s rock cues land as a genuine plus rather than needle-drop filler.

The case against it

FictionMachine's review is unsparing, filing the film under what it calls "bottom-drawer cinema" and arguing it fails at the one job its title promises: "if a viewer cannot rely on a film titled Street Fighter to reliably deliver some street fights, its collective artists and technicians really need to give up." Specifically, Watson argues the action is "perplexingly captured in medium shots and close-ups" that obscure whatever choreography was actually performed, adding up to "a panicky riot of colour and fast editing" rather than legible fights — a direct contradiction of the praise the same choreography gets elsewhere, which is itself telling about how unevenly this movie is landing. The Toronto Star's Rob Salem was blunter still, rating it 2 out of 5 and calling it "big, dumb, loud and violent" but ultimately "completely lifeless," predicting it might put some viewers to sleep despite the noise.

The shared complaint: a script that can't commit

Even the more forgiving reviews converge on the same structural problem. Casey's Movie Mania flags "stop-start pacing" that keeps undercutting its own momentum as the plot "jumps from one point to another," and specifically calls out that Guile, Dhalsim, and Zangief — three of the series' most recognizable characters — get reduced to "thankless roles" despite a cast deep enough to use them properly. David Dastmalchian's M. Bison, the film's central villain, draws a specific knock for "surprisingly" lacking "the much-needed sinister vibe" a Street Fighter movie needs from its big bad. FictionMachine's review adds that the ending arrives abruptly, without a real climax, which Casey's review frames more generously as the film "prioritizing a sequel-bait approach rather than wrapping up its own story" — two ways of describing the same complaint: this movie doesn't actually finish what it starts.

Where to watch it, and whether it's worth the ticket

Street Fighter opens in wide theatrical release on October 16, 2026, distributed by Paramount Pictures as the first release under its new global distribution deal with Legendary. As of this writing, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic hadn't yet posted an aggregate critics score, with reviews still rolling in after the embargo lifted — a genuinely useful thing to check for yourself before buying a ticket, given how far apart the reviews already filed land from each other. The honest recommendation splits by what you're optimizing for: if you want to see Ryu and Chun-Li done right by committed performances and a handful of genuinely well-shot fight sequences, there's something here. If a coherent, satisfying story matters more to you than individual moments working, several of the most detailed reviews filed so far suggest you'll notice the seams.

The bottom line

Street Fighter is a movie its own reviewers can't agree on past two specific points: Koji and Liang are doing real work, and the script doesn't finish what the fights start. That's not nothing for a video-game adaptation, a genre with a long history of getting even less right — but it's also not the knockout a 120-minute, nine-figure-budget tournament movie with this cast had the ingredients to be.