Review of Tekken (2010) by Lenny R — 12 Feb 2011

Good in that it makes use of the Jin/Jun/Kazuya/Heihachi story thread that runs through the games. And some of the fights appear to be fairly well choreographed and executed, though it's hard to tell a lot of the time because the camera work is, well, lousy.

The movie avoids one of Street Fighter's main problems (cramming in every single character from every iteration of the game to the point that some are reduced to one-line console operators, milkmen, etc) by only going with a few fighters, but some of the choices are a little strange, particularly the ones they chose to omit. No Paul Phoenix? No Ling Xiaoyu? No Hworang? No ROGER?! But they've put in a blond Englishman and named him Steve Fox, just so he seems like he's supposed to be there, I guess. Not that he does any actual fighting, though. Marshall Law, who I like in the games because he's a funny, cranky restaurateur who was seemingly cloned from Bruce Lee, is, in the movie -- none of those things. And I suppose Christie, being more or less the only young female character from the game who's not an assassin or an underage schoolgirl, had to make it in, though it might have worked better if they'd left out Eddie and actually allowed her to do Capoeira. Yoshi could have been done better, too.

No Nathan Jones as Marduk? Really? What? Was he too expensive? The dude was BORN to play that role.

So, while the quality of filmmaking is a bit shoddy, the script is really only disappointing rather than particularly bad. That's not to say it's Shakespeare; it switches between cliched and downright bizarre, and it's often ridiculously melodramatic, but so are the cutscenes in the games. Overall, it's considerably better than Street Fighter, and probably even the Mortal Kombats and DOA, though I'm less familiar with those.