Should Video Games be adapted into films? This is a question that has plagued us for years. From Street Fighter to MK: Annihilation to Every Uwe Boll adaptation in existence, Video Game movies have done nothing over the years but let us down. Now a film has been made based off of the successful Tekken Franchise and much to my surprise it was pretty damn good. It wasn't very faithful to the source material of the game but can you think of one adaptation that was? Tekken is actually a damn good action film that delivers a lot of heart and some rather unique fight sequences.
The setting of Tekken is a ravaged, in the near future, Earth that is recovering from a time known as the Terror Wars. The governments of the world have been extinguished and are now divided into sectors, each controlled by one of the six mega corporations, known together as Iron Fist. The most powerful of these corporations is Tekken which controls what used to be The United States and is run by an honorable CEO, known as Heihachi Mishima. In the danger filled Zones of Tekken City, known as The Anvil, we meet our main hero Jin Kazama who has to be one of the ballsiest guys on the planet. I mean this guy smuggles a hard drive through a damn shooting gallery so that he can buy his girl a bar of chocolate. Desperate for attention or for sex, you decide. Unfortunately his latest smuggling job goes bad and leads Tekken Police, led by Heihachi's son, Kazuya, straight to his home and his mother. When his mother is killed, he seeks vengeance on the man he believes to be responsible, Heihachi, and it doesn't take long for Jin to enter the Tekken tournament to get just that.
There's no demon lord, there's no master plan to take over the world as Tekken is already in control and there's no secret genetic experiments creating super soldiers using the fighter's DNA. Jin just wants to deliver the vengeance that his mother deserves and the other charcaters from the games either side with him or just get in his way. Thankfully though, the movie manages to work by almost never slowing down on the action, the gorgeous women and the incredible fight scenes. There is a lot of brutal fighting in this movie. The fighting made a UFC Brawl look like a Power Rangers Christmas Special. Every fight scene in every other video game movie is pure garbage compared to this and yes, I do include Mortal Kombat in that statement. Normally I would be pissed when an adaptation strays away from its source material, but the movie was so much fun and so interesting that I just couldn't care. I wanted to care, I went in expecting to tear this movie apart mercilessly, but I couldn't.
Jon Foo plays Jin Kazama with perfection and carried his role of the revenge lusting pretty boy very well. Ian Anthony Daniel was menacing as Kazuya Mishima and made for a great villain. And I have to say they couldn't have found anyone better for Heihachi than Shang Tsung himself, Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa. He got the look and the personality of the character down flat. One character that will also be debated by hardcore fans is Christie Monteiro who in the film is not brazilian. However, kelly Overton is gorgeous, a great actress and her female role was given a much larger part than she ever had in the game franchise so to be honest, I didn't really care about the whole brazilian thing.
Tekken is a film that will most likely be compared to 2 other video game adapatations, Mortal Kombat & DOA. But where as MK focused more on its mythology and DOA on nothing of any value, Tekken focused on Mix Martial Arts beatdowns and a fast paced story with a few turning points that will have you glued to seat for the duration of the film. So overall, how does Tekken measure up to the competition. Well so far the only good video game adaptations I've seen up until now were Final Fantasy: Advent Children, Mortal Kombat & that's about it. Tekken strikes hard throughout its entire 1 hour 26 minute runtime. Tekken's gritty action scenes and well-paced story makes it my favorite Video Game Film to date. Watching it, I kept having Nostalgic flashbacks of The Karate Kid, Mortal Kombat & Bloodsport. What saddens me the most is the fact that horrible videogame films like Legend of Chun Li, Alone in the Dark & The Resident Evil Trilogy were all aloud to have theatrical releases and this film went straight to DVD. WTF? I don't get it, I just don't get it at all! What imbecile in Hollywood allows these things to happen, explain it to me.
But anyway, I thought this movie would be a standard, horrible, video game adaptation and I stand here saying that my intuition was wrong this time. The movie was a lot of fun and as long as you don;t go in expecting it to be exactly like the game with a boxing Panda, you should have fun as well. That's right I liked it, bring the hate mail!
Final Rating: 8/10
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