Out for just over a week now, Street Fighter is having a rough time at the cinema. The film is struggling at the box office and the reviews have been anything but kind to this adaptation of Capcom's famous fighting game. Director Kitao Sakurai, however, doesn't seem to regret his choices one bit — quite the opposite. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the director fully owns the unhinged tone of his feature, which was never meant to resemble a dark, realistic Batman Begins sort of film in the first place. Because while some fans would have preferred a more serious approach, Legendary, the studio behind the project, specifically wanted to capture the absurd, completely bonkers side of the Street Fighter universe. And Kitao Sakurai explains very clearly why doing it any other way was never on the table. And when you look at the director's CV — The Eric Andre Show and the comedy Bad Trip — you quickly understand why Legendary came knocking.
"A Batman Begins-style Street Fighter? Absolutely not!"
"If I had pitched the Batman Begins of Street Fighter, we certainly wouldn't be sitting here talking today," the director tells The Hollywood Reporter. In short, there was never any question of turning Ryu and Ken into tortured heroes in a world where every fight has to carry dramatic consequences. Producer Cale Boyter, over at Legendary, was adamant about keeping the unhinged energy that, in his view, is part of the franchise's identity. Which is precisely why Kitao Sakurai was rather well placed to deliver it. His work has always been marked by a pronounced taste for the absurd, with situations that look completely mad on paper but work thanks to the sheer energy they give off. He explains that a scene doesn't necessarily need to be perfectly logical to be interesting. If it brings something to the film and feeds into its atmosphere, it can earn its place in the story.
That's the philosophy he wanted to apply to Street Fighter, putting the relationship between Ken and Ryu at the heart of the story, played respectively by Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji. In the game as in the film, the two fighters are presented as friends turned adoptive brothers, who have to rebuild their bond after drifting apart. The director also allowed himself a few fairly unexpected visual choices. To recount certain events from the past, he opted for hand-drawn animated sequences, in a style inspired by 1990s anime. An idea that inevitably brings Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill to mind. And contrary to what you might think, it wasn't a way of cutting costs. Kitao Sakurai explains that traditional animation takes a great deal of time and money, but that those animated scenes were there to find a different way of telling his story.
The critics weren't having it, audiences rather more so
Either way, not everyone was won over by the result. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film sits at 41% with critics, against 78% with audiences. Here at screenactu, we gave it 4.1/10, bang on the international press average. We called it right. Naturally, with a showing that mediocre, a sequel is hard to imagine, even if the ending of Street Fighter leaves a few doors open, with threads that could be developed in a follow-up film. For now, though, nothing has been set in motion. Asked about it, Kitao Sakurai confirms that the subject has come up, but no script has been written and no concrete project has got under way. The director makes no secret of wanting to return to this universe, especially as the cast also seem to have had a whale of a time on set. But before anyone thinks about a second instalment, Legendary will obviously need convincing that the first one did well enough. For our part, we reckon the carnage can stop right here.
