'Street Fighter' Review: A Fun Arcade Brawl That Fumbles Its Own Story

The Short Version is in the box above. Here is the longer truth: Street Fighter is a loud, goofy, genuinely fun arcade brawl that keeps tripping over its own plot. It is not the disaster the review embargo had people bracing for, and it is not the knockout this franchise has been chasing since 1994 either. It is a split decision — and for a Friday night with a bucket of popcorn, a split decision might be enough.

The Setup

Paramount, Legendary and Capcom set this one in 1993, which is the smartest call in the whole movie. Estranged fighters Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) get pulled back into the fight when Chun-Li (Callina Liang) recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament — a competition staged in the fictional nation of Metrolao, run by dictator M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) and his Shadaloo organization. Behind the tournament sits a conspiracy aimed squarely at Ryu, and at the power sleeping inside him. No spoilers past that: the brothers have history, the tournament is a trap, and everybody in the bracket has a reason to be there.

The roster is the marketing. All 12 original Street Fighter II fighters show up, plus a few more: Jason Momoa as Blanka, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Roman Reigns as Akuma, 50 Cent as Balrog, Orville Peck as Vega, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki and Eric André as ring announcer Don Sauvage. Director Kitao Sakurai — of The Eric Andre Show and Bad Trip — shoots Ryu and Ken's backstory as hand-drawn anime flashbacks, and those sequences are some of the prettiest minutes in the film.

What Works

The fights, first and most. Sakurai stages the action clean enough that you can follow a punch from wind-up to landing, which puts this ahead of half the superhero output of the last five years. Critics who like the movie keep landing on the same point: the cast is all-in. Screen Rant scored it 70 and praised the style and tonal control; IGN gave it a 60, crediting an enthusiastic cast and an anarchic spirit. Centineo's Ken is the surprise — a cocky showboat you end up rooting for — and Koji gives Ryu a weary gravity that keeps the silliness around him from floating away. Liang's Chun-Li has real fire, and Dastmalchian hams Bison up into a pantomime dictator without trying to outdo Raul Julia's 1994 turn, which nobody should attempt.

The 1993 of it all works too. The fuzzy 4:3 cutaways, the arcade-era needle drops, the whole film lit like a cabinet attract screen — it knows the assignment is nostalgia with its sleeves rolled up.

What Doesn't

The story. Seventeen fighters is a roster, not a cast, and the film keeps stopping the tournament people paid to see so it can service backstories and secret agendas that never quite pay off. The Hollywood Reporter (50) said the film tries to thread the needle between fan service and newcomers and satisfies neither camp. Metacritic has it at 45 off 22 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes at 44–47 percent — and the spread tells the story: roughly a fifth of critics loved the swing, most found it mixed, and a loud minority called it an incoherent mess. The humor is the swing factor. When it lands, the movie is a riot; when it doesn't — and there are long stretches where it doesn't — you feel every minute of the 1-hour-59-minute runtime. Momoa's CG-heavy Blanka is already the most argued-about element in the picture, and not in a good way.

The Verdict

Here is the honest Previously line: Street Fighter is a C-plus movie and a B-plus night out. If you grew up feeding quarters into a Street Fighter II cabinet, the fan service is real, the fights deliver, and you will leave grinning about at least three scenes. If you have no history with the games, the plot will lose you by the second act and the jokes will decide whether you stay. It is better than the 1994 film by a wide margin and clears 2009's The Legend of Chun-Li without breaking a sweat — low bars, but this series needed somebody to clear them. See it with a crowd, on the biggest screen you can, and do not wait for streaming: this is a movie built to be yelled at with friends.

Previously grade: C+ (B+ if you know what a Hadouken is).

How to Watch

Street Fighter is in theaters now, wide release as of Friday, October 16, 2026, from Paramount Pictures. It is theatrical-only at launch — Paramount's 2026 releases have run a roughly 45-day exclusive window, which points to premium VOD around early December, with a Paramount+ debut after that. No streaming date has been announced yet; we will update this review when one is.

Running time is 1 hour 59 minutes, rated PG-13 for violence and action, bloody images, strong language, sexual references, partial nudity and brief smoking. Reported production budget: $82 million. More from the newsroom: revisit our review of Tyler Perry's Doing Life and our Animals review.

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