From Disaster to Delirium: Street Fighter Finally Speaks Its Own Language

Verdict up front: the 2026 Street Fighter pulls off a reversal of 1994’s misfire — not through sturdier storytelling, but by finally embracing the glorious absurdity of its source material.

Judged on fidelity, the 1994 film was a catastrophe. Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Colonel Guile hijacked the plot, Ryu and Ken were reduced to bickering conmen, and Raúl Juliá’s M. Bison — for all that “for me, it was Tuesday” magnificence — remained trapped behind rubber prosthetics and plywood sets. It scraped 18% on Rotten Tomatoes yet still hauled in nearly $100 million worldwide, proving that fans craved merely to see the characters, quality be damned.

The new outing takes the opposite road. Director Sakurai Kitao sets proceedings in 1993, with Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo) as washed-up champions dragged back into the World Warrior tournament by the enigmatic Chun-Li (Callina Liang). The visual strategy is deliberate and unapologetic: Cody Rhodes’s flat-topped Guile, 50 Cent’s Balrog, Orville Peck’s masked Vega, Roman Reigns’s Akuma, Vidyut Jammwal’s stretch-limbed Dhalsim, Hirooki Goto’s E. Honda, Olivier Richters’s hulking Zangief, and Mel Jarnson’s Cammy . Every choice declares that this film refuses the timid “realism” of so many game adaptations, opting instead for arcade-era garishness.

And Blanka is a delightful presence. Momoa throws every ounce of actorly vanity out of the window — he bellows as he bursts from his enclosure, shatters stone with his bare hands, electricity crackling off him. That growled “then you die” to Ryu carries a wild, knowing mischief, and the way he scrambles up the cage wall afterwards is almost playful. This gleeful abandon captures the very soul of the character: Blanka has always been a beast trapped in a human shell, and Momoa plays the sheer don’t-care mania of it. For those of us who grew up on pixelated sprites, watching a Hollywood star happily paint himself green, roar, and get blasted across the arena by a fireball is its own kind of tribute.

From 1994’s evasion to 2026’s embrace, the franchise has learnt one lesson at last: when your source material is a world of oiled titans hurling fireballs, solemnity is the gravest insult of all. For the diehard faithful, this isn’t a film to be judged — it’s one to shout move names at.

Elven Ho