God Help Me, I Actually Loved Street Fighter

I try to keep my guard up. As we see the fallout of Marvel and Star Wars’ former successes that compelled studios to buy the film rights to whatever IP appeals to millennial men with income, I try not to let my senses get flash-banged by slavish renditions of things I loved at thirteen. But I’m a cheap date. Jingle the nostalgia keys, and I will yearn for when dumb presidents had decorum. Watching Mortal Kombat II, all it took was Liu Kang and Kung Lao fighting in the portal stage to get me clapping like a seal. I loved Masters of the Universe too, to the chagrin of my coworkers who refuse to believe me even now.

I’ve studied Soviet filmmaking and the French New Wave and came up during the indiewood boom of the 1990s and 2000s. I advocate to anyone who will listen to seek out independent and foreign cinema. And I’m a fan of Stephen Chow, whose oeuvre of anarchic cult favorites like Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer is obvious touchstones for what I’m about to talk about. So it’s with a heavy sigh I admit that Street Fighter, terrible as it is, is incredibly stupid fun.

In theaters now, Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter is the latest video game movie of the month, hot on the heels of Zach Cregger’s acclaimed Resident Evil (also based on a Capcom property). It’s a remake/reboot/whatever of the seminal arcade franchise about a global martial arts tournament with competitors who can shoot fireballs, perform twelve-foot vertical suplexes, or stretch their limbs. There was a memorably bad movie in 1994, with Jean-Claude Van Damme as the lead and Raul Julia as the evil M. Bison. Street Fighter 2026 is similarly bad, but rather than render a cartoon world into a realistic one like its predecessor, it doubles down on the hyper-unrealism of martial artists capable of superhuman feats and poor taste in haircuts.

This time, the movie stars a bevy of underrated heavy-hitters, like Warrior’s Andrew Koji as main character Ryu, a monk-like champion, and recurring Christopher Nolan/Denis Villeneuve player David Dastmalchian, whose villainous M. Bison comes off as a mad dictator coded with sexual deviancy. (In one scene, he crushes an underling’s head with his bare hands; when blood spurts, his eyes roll back in ecstasy.) There are also familiar faces meant to draw in the Gen Z cohort. Noah Centineo flexes his ab muscles as Ken Masters, Ryu’s former best friend and rival, and controversial comedian Andrew Schulz as Ken’s assistant Dan Hibiki (a joke character in the lore), who winds up the unexpected heart of the whole thing.

There are also noteworthy newcomers that Street Fighter might well turn into stars by Monday: Callina Liang as the iconic Chun-Li, an undercover agent with lightning kicks, and Mel Jarnson as sexy henchman Cammy. (Street Fighter’s strongest assets are, without a doubt, its women, and this movie will inspire a lot of young boys’ first crushes.) Throw in random famous people like 50 Cent and Orville Peck, professional wrestlers Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, and Hirooki Goto, and Eric André cashing a paycheck as a grating emcee, and Street Fighter is basically a celebrity cosplay group photo at San Diego Comic-Con.

Street Fighter reaches for emotional heft in its story about brotherhood and estrangement. Ryu and Ken came up as fellow students and loved each other like brothers until envy, jealousy, and the murder of their master—carried out by Akuma (a TERRIFYING Roman Reigns), a warrior from the underworld—drove them apart. Years after Ryu’s victory at the World Warrior Tournament, the terrorist leader M. Bison (Dastmalchian) sponsors the next tournament to siphon the powers of its competitors to amass even greater power for himself.

To its detriment, Street Fighter goes out of its way to ensure the game’s kooky roster looks and feels like their 2D counterparts, to the point it forgets to put on halfway decent fight scenes or tell a legible story. Maybe my standards were raised too high by The Furious, but Street Fighter figuratively and literally loses track of the plot. There are barely any matches in this movie about a martial arts tournament, and the few fight scenes end with anticlimactic thuds. Say what you want about Mortal Kombat II, but it at least knew how to structure a coherent plot and raise the stakes through winners and elimination.

So what’s actually fun and good about Street Fighter? Everything else. The actors are clearly having a ball playing dress-up, with Koji most of all as a tortured wanderer that the British actor seems born to play Ryu. (And deserving of so much more from here on.) Unlike Van Damme, WWE star Cody Rhodes leans into Guile as a lunkheaded hero, delivering his lines with deadpan seriousness (and a touch of homoeroticism). If the volleyball scene in Top Gun were personified into a character, it would become Cody Rhodes’s Guile. When there is action, Street Fighter is almost sublime. Manga-inspired high-impact frames replicate the feeling of decisive blows in arcade matchups, while shoryuken uppercuts and spinning flash kicks are put to screen with pure elegance. Street Fighter is utterly shameless about its pandering, and it’s allowed to be because it executes on the moments so well.

There’s just an overwhelming sense of unrepentant chaos, as if it’s been made by dollops of juvenile machismo and cheese and even some sex appeal that’s been absent from Marvel’s ascetic superheroes. I can’t stress enough how much the women (and Centineo’s abs) are a draw. Between their form-fitting costumes, shapely physiques, and representation as feminine power fantasies, Street Fighter has enough to suggest that sex might finally sell again. There’s no time for any lovemaking in Street Fighter—not even a half-baked romance—but one brief and tasteful shower scene and the sweaty bodies of all the men and women make the movie vibrate with palpable hormonal energy. You don’t miss something until it’s gone, and Street Fighter is a welcome reminder of what we’ve been missing.

I don’t believe in “turn off your brain” movies. You should never turn off your power to think and feel. Popcorn movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future are classics because, when made with actual skill, it is easy to participate as an audience member. I can’t in good conscience tell you to “turn off your brain” to enjoy Street Fighter, because we should uphold standards and say with sober certainty when any movie, even one based on an arcade game, falls short of its most essential purpose. But I’m only human. Just because I have a brain doesn’t mean I can’t be a little stupid, too.