Review of Tekken (2010) by Erno K — 14 Nov 2010

I had been awaiting this movie for years, ever since I heard it went into production eons ago. I mean, they can't possibly make a completely bad film about Tekken, right? Right!? Well, maybe it's not completely rotten, but it sure is bad. And this comes from a man who counts tournament fighting movies as their own awesome genre.

As an entertaining, quality motion picture, Tekken is truly horrible. Make no mistake, my rating consists entirely of the fights. More on those later. They use all the possible cliches (Think training flashbacks during fights, for example) with the story, and some of the dialogue scenes are downright embarrassing with equally laughable "emotion-elevating" score on the background. I think I literally rolled my eyes a few times. They try to portray some kind of emotional journey for Jin, but boy does it fall flat. When you try too hard and fail in this, the end result is hilarious.

The characters are thinner than Angelina Jolie's arms and some of them are pure window dressing (All the women). Only Heihachi and his son come through without humiliating themselves, as their scenes together are bearable. And let's be real here, no woman's ass should hang half outside her pants, as seems to be the fashion trend here. That is not sexy, it's tacky.

The fights are not directed in the worst possible mannere, but they sure could be a lot better. At least there are no flash cuts this time, but I can't understand why the camera has to shake this much. All the female fighters are a huge disappointment, as there is only one woman-fight and even that is edited way more than any other. So I guess they went for the looks and not the skills in that department. Some of the moves in the fights are decent, so the scraps are not a total waste of time.

I haven't played the game in ages, but do they really use this many weapons now? There are as many fights with axes or chains as there are without. I hate that shit. Unarmed combat is what we want to see. And we is me, by the way.

Astute readers can probably already guess I was disappointed. Well, fuck yeah! In my opinion, they went in an entirely wrong direction with this one. They should have concentrated on the tournament, not running around town escaping gunmen and being all rebellious and shit.

Also, is there a martial arts movie nowadays that doesn't have Cung Le in it? The bastard is everywhere! I'm so tired right now I can barely read anymore, so I take no responsibility of possible grammatical errors and the ilk in this review. Anyway, play Tekken, do not watch it.