In 1994, Street Fighter was a critical failure. Not merely a bad video-game movie, but evidence that Hollywood fundamentally did not understand video games, martial arts, Street Fighter, acting, geography or possibly human behaviour. Though it made money, critics and fans hated it equally.
Thirty-two years later? The movie kind of rules.
Make no mistake, Street Fighter is nonsense. Ryu and Ken — the actual stars of the games — are relegated to a pair of dodgy hustlers while Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Colonel Guile takes centre stage, armed with an accent apparently developed by putting Belgium, America and several unidentified nations into a blender. The fighting is frequently underwhelming, the plot is overcrowded, and almost every character from Street Fighter II has been shoehorned into proceedings whether the screenplay has somewhere sensible to put them or not.
And yet… FUN.
There’s colour. Sets. Costumes. Explosions. Actual human beings standing in actual rooms. Everyone looks like they’re appearing in the world’s most expensive Saturday-morning cartoon, and Raul Julia — gravely ill during production — somehow decides M. Bison deserves Shakespearean commitment. His delivery of “For me, it was Tuesday” remains better than this movie has any right to possess.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Street Fighter, though, is that it exists at all. The production was chaos. A rigid Christmas release date meant there was virtually no room for failure, then the Thailand shoot immediately began haemorrhaging time thanks to monsoon rain, unsuitable locations and production headaches. Jean-Claude Van Damme, meanwhile, was at the absolute peak of his fame and apparently treating the production schedule more as a loose suggestion. Director Steven E. de Souza later described him as heavily affected by cocaine addiction, regularly calling in sick, disappearing overseas and returning late while the crew desperately shot whatever scenes they could without their leading man.
Oh, and somewhere amongst all this he found time to hook up with Kylie Minogue. Of course he did. Van Damme later confirmed the affair himself, because apparently filming a major Hollywood action movie while battling a serious drug problem, missing work and playing Guile wasn’t enough side content for one man. By all reasonable laws of filmmaking, this thing should have collapsed into the sea. Instead, it made it to cinemas.
And strangely, time has been kind to it. Compared with the carefully focus-tested, digitally scrubbed, endlessly self-aware blockbusters we’re fed today, Street Fighter feels almost refreshing. It’s clumsy, sincere, colourful and completely unafraid of looking ridiculous. Nobody is winking at the audience every thirty seconds to reassure us they know it’s silly. They simply commit to the silliness.
That gives it something increasingly rare: charm.
So yes, judged objectively, Street Fighter remains a deeply flawed movie. But I’d honestly rather revisit its rubbery sets, insane casting and glorious Raul Julia performance than sit through another $200 million slab of grey CGI in which six characters explain the plot while standing in front of a green screen.
With the new Street Fighter arriving in cinemas on October 16, 2026, now is actually the perfect time to go back and watch this beautiful disaster first. Not because the new film needs homework.
Because every new challenger should know what survived the previous round.
7/10
James J.