Street Fighter review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 10.22.26
★★½ 2.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Framed as a kids’ movie rather than a nostalgia play, Street Fighter swings broad and bouncy but never gives me much to care about, and the jokes can’t carry the slack. Callina Liang’s Chun-Li is the bright spot—magnetic, striking, and doing the most with too little. Noah Centineo brings the bulk but not the character; Andrew Schulz acts better but isn’t as funny as he should be, despite decent chemistry with Centineo. The lore’s thin, sure, yet others have built more from less. It’s fine—just not much fun.
Full review — contains spoilers
This didn’t really work for me, but I’m going to be as generous as possible, because I think twelve-year-old me would have absolutely loved this movie. A lot of video game adaptations cater to millennials reminiscing about the games we grew up playing. This felt much more straightforwardly like a kids’ movie. I’m not going to call it bad just because I’m not the audience, but I also can’t pretend I had much fun watching it.
I probably have higher standards for video game and comic book movies than the genres justify. But I’ve seen them done well, so I want them done well. This was a mess to me. The story never gave me much reason to care about what was happening, and the comedy didn’t do enough to carry it.
One exception is Callina Liang, who plays Chun-Li. She gets nothing but praise from me. She’s absolutely gorgeous, and she does the best she can with a role that doesn’t give her much to work with. She was easily my favorite part of the movie. That may involve some bias on my part as a grown man, but there it is.
I like Noah Centineo, and I’ve enjoyed watching his career move upward. But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re running into a wall with the acting. I’m still waiting for evidence that he can really inhabit a character, and his performance as Ken didn’t provide it. He got ridiculously jacked for this, so he certainly had his superhero glow-up. The physical preparation was there. The performance was more of a struggle.
Andrew Schulz fares better from an acting standpoint, but I wanted him to be funnier. He and Centineo have decent chemistry, and they should have done more with it. This should have been way more fun.
The story is thin, but so is the backstory they’re working with. Mortal Kombat made an effort to build a mythology. Street Fighter’s lore has very little substance by comparison. It’s like giving the opponents in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! backstories. There just isn’t much there to work with, so that part isn’t really the movie’s fault.
If you like these kinds of movies, go see it, it's fine. It won't hurt you.😄