Ahead of the Friday release, director Kitao Sakurai says the Indian action star brought real authenticity to a character his own team was once unsure about including.
Vidyut Jammwal is about to become a World Warrior, and the man directing him can't stop talking about it.
Street Fighter, Paramount and Legendary's live-action take on the Capcom game franchise, hits Indian cinemas on Friday, October 16, in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Jammwal plays Dhalsim, the yoga-practising, limb-stretching fighter who's been part of the series since the early '90s. It's his Hollywood debut.
Director Kitao Sakurai has now opened up about why Jammwal got the part, and he isn't holding back. "He's more Dhalsim than Dhalsim, and he owns it, and he's so proud of it," Sakurai said, according to Bollywood Hungama. "He's bringing so much realness and authenticity to it."
That quote is doing a lot of work, because Dhalsim almost didn't make the cut. Sakurai has said his own team was initially unsure whether the character belonged in this adaptation at all. He pushed back, convinced Dhalsim was too central to the Street Fighter world to leave out.
There's a harder conversation buried in there too. Sakurai acknowledged that Dhalsim, as originally drawn in the games, carries elements that read as stereotype. His answer wasn't to drop the character. It was to cast someone who could ground him in something real. That's where Jammwal came in, reportedly keen to use the role to walk audiences through Dhalsim's actual origins rather than lean on the shorthand version.
The cast around him is stacked. Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji lead, with Jason Momoa, 50 Cent and WWE's Roman Reigns also in the mix, per Cinema Express. The film had its world premiere in Los Angeles recently, and the early word has been mostly favourable, with reviewers singling out the action choreography and the way the film nods at the source game. The storytelling has drawn some criticism, which is about par for the course with video game adaptations.
This isn't new territory for Capcom's franchise either. There was a Jean-Claude Van Damme live-action film and an animated feature, both from 1994, and a 2009 spinoff with Kristin Kreuk. None of those cracked the code on making a fighting game feel like a proper movie. Whether this version does is what Friday's release will decide.
For Jammwal, regardless of how the film lands at the global box office, the bigger story is simpler. An Indian action star just landed a lead-ish role in a major Hollywood tentpole, playing a character the studio itself wasn't sure how to handle. That's worth watching on its own terms, before anyone gets to arguing about whether the fireballs look right.
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