Brandon Pence

I recently had the chance to catch a sneak peek at the new Tekken film based on the video games.

First off, I am a huge fan of the video games. I’ve always enjoyed fighting games and Tekken has been one of my favorites (along with Soul Caliber, Guilty Gear X and Mortal Kombat… and of course, KILLER INSTINCT~!)

However I have never been so into the games that I learned every characters backstory. I’ve always found the story aspect of the Tekken games to be a disjointed mess of “neat” cut scenes with fighting and explosions that have very little actual merit or story.

So going into the Tekken movie, I didn’t expect much. I figured it would be absolutely terrible but I ended up enjoying it. I wouldn’t watch it again but for a single viewing it was kind of cool to see the characters I’ve controlled digitally for years come to life and fight one another.

My favorite characters were always Eddy Gordo, Yoshimitsu, Lei Wulong and Jin Kazama.

Lei Wulong is nowhere to be found in the film at all, however the rest are in there and are amazingly accurate to their in game counterparts.

Eddy Gordo is simply perfect in the film. The actor (who is also in the completely win Mortal Kombat Rebirth short film…) is amazing in this role. He moves exactly like Eddy Gordo and at times it’s rather impressive to realize you’re watching a real person doing this shit.

The movie puts a very large focus on Raven which I found a bit odd because I’ve never known anyone who played as him mainly. But there you go.

The movie definitely looks and feels like Tekken. The lighting is rather interesting for a fighting movie and takes a much more industrial approach to everything than the Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat movies did.

There are also so “super powers” or anything.

The movie takes the Mortal Kombat Rebirth approach to the acting as well by hiring martial artists instead of actors. This keeps the acting bar pretty low and the action bar high but the movie does a good job of hiding their weaknesses. The movie is hardly non-stop fighting but it has decent enough actors for the people who have to act. Characters who only have 5 or 10 lines aren’t the best actors but it works.

There are lots of wide shots like this which help keep the feel of the video game intact. The color scheme is also very accurate to the games and everything is overly saturated and hyper realistic.

The story focuses mainly on Jin Kazama and the murder of his mother. He joins the Iron Fist tournament to get a shot at Heihachi (played by the dude who played Shang Tsung in the Mortal Kombat film…). The story is simple enough to work. Typical revenge movie with no twists or shocks but in a movie like this, you didn’t anticipate a deep story.

The actor who plays Jin does a good enough job and the outfit/fighting style is very accurate to the film. None of his lightning abilities are ever touched on and I remembered his tattoo slightly bigger, but it works. They even try to explain his red gloves (although the person who gave them to him seemed totally fucking irrelevant and serves only to move the fighting scenes along) but they did try.

Heihachi never actually fights. Or wears his pimp wooden shoes. Both of those things were rather disappointing actually.

One thing I actually didn’t like about the film was the changing of the Jack character. Rather than Jack being a big, robotic brute… they changed the Jack’s to these masked robotic ninjas. It makes sense budget wise that they couldn’t have the Jack’s but I think they could have found some sort of compromise. They are enough explosions in the film that some of them could have been sacrificed to have the Jack’s in my eyes. At the very least if you can’t have the Jack’s, don’t call the ninja guys Jack’s. Just drop the Jack idea altogether, don’t try to tell me those fence mask wearing ninjas are Jack.

Yoshimitsu is great in the film although they never touch on his robotic traits. In fact the film goes to great lengths to explain that no robotics or artificial enhancements are allowed in the tournament. However, Bryan Fury has his robotics in the film and is plainly obvious. I mean, he gets kicked square in the face in one scene and doesn’t even flinch. His wounds heal during the fight. How they justify this doesn’t make sense and it really doesn’t make sense that they ignored Yoshimitsu’s robotic traits with that information.

But.. he fights like Yoshimitsu otherwise.

He does give reason to one of my bigger problems with the film; armed combat. Yoshimitsu has always had his sword however he was perfectly good without it. In the film, they arm his enemies so the fights are weapon based fights. Then to keep with this, they have another totally fucking irrelevant weapon fight with Bryan Fury.

It would have made more sense to me to have Kazama disarm Yoshimitsu and then continue the fight unarmed rather than arm Kazama. They also give Bryan Fury a silly ass chain wrapped in razor wire that seems incredibly out of place.

In short, I liked the film. It’s not great by any means but the style of the film is pretty cool and the characters are fairly accurate. There are a few silly scenes but in fighting game movies, I think we all expect a little stupidity.

If you get a chance to see it, check it out. It’s not a bad way to kill 2 hours.

Oh and for all you haters out there who hate on people who play as Eddy Gordo… in the words of Spoony… I AM THE LORD OF TEKKEN AND I WILL AIR JUGGLE YOU ASS~!!!!!!!!!