Street Fighter (2026)

In the moment, Street Fighter felt like one of the worst movies I’d ever seen. It is, weeks later, still the worst movie I’ve seen this year (worse than One Night Only, even, of which I said hoped would be, “God willing, the worst movie I see this decade”), but it feels harmless now, like if Masters of the Universe had the rancid vibes of a gooner subreddit and starred a professional wrestler I don’t like.

Street Fighter is both slavishly concerned with satisfying every corner of the franchise’s fandom, from the video game to the anime adaptations to the 1994 JCVD vehicle I adore (but will now never be able to convince my partner to watch), and wildly disrespectful of said fandom’s time and attention, turning a tournament fighting video game in which most rounds last 30 seconds into a bloated, two hour long slog that has the gall to end without resolving any of its conflicts, setting up a sequel that it doesn’t deserve.

Its characters are paper thin, even by the standards of a goofy video game adaptation, and because Street Fighter plays so broad, a lot of the characters from the Capcom fighter, who were already bordering on racist caricature in 1991, tip all the way into it. It takes place in a version of 1993 that exists only in AI-generated Google search results about “the 90s” and is most faithful to its time and place in its sheer tonnage of “no homo” humor.

I am a lizard-brained dork when it comes to illegal underground karate tournament movies to the extent that I probably would have enjoyed Street Fighter if it had a good eye for fighting sequences, but that’s arguably one of the film’s weakest elements. Everyone is muscular and wildly proportioned and no doubt tried very hard, but when it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, every fight, from tournament bouts to MCU-style group brawls, is a flavorless smear of motion, assembled in the least appealing way imaginable. Every fight feels like it’s being choreographed and edited as if none of the actors once occupied the same room, and the rest of the film being a jarring melange of flat music synchs, animated flashbacks, and a general aesthetic verging on slop suggests an overall lack of authorial intent.

It’s bad, and I knew it would be bad, but I watched the whole thing and am writing about it weeks later, so fuck me I guess. There is no real story to be finished in a sequel, but Street Fighter eked out enough of a profit to maybe get one, and hopefully I’ll be smart enough two years from now to, in the words of Guile actor Cody Rhodes, avoid, avoid, avoid.