Review of Tekken (2010) by Andy O — 20 Aug 2010

DVD Premiere! two words guaranteed to induce fear in any film fan and when added together with the words "adapted from the video game .." most are running for the hills, but this is in fact rather good.

Now I must admit before people insist Ive completely gone insane that yes I did grow up playing pretty much all the versions of the Tekken games, but leaving that aside Tekken is a slick action movie with some clever underground themes.

Firstly the action sequences in the movie are of a very high standard, true combat in martial arts is almost a form of violent dance and Tekken captures this perfectly.

The action sequences obviously dominate the movie and yes hide a very shaky plot (with even shakier dialogue) but it ebbs and flows well entertaining the viewer as well as making the 1 hour 32 minutes pass very quickly.

The film centers around the character of Jin Kazama in a world that is run completely by eight corporations and follows his quest to win the iron fist tournament.

One of the problems however with this movie is that it spends its time trying to please two main audiences, loyal games as well as normal cinema viewers.

This creates a fundamental problem that actually probably is the main reason this is a straight to DVD release, the film follows the games very closely (so one of the big plot twists is already known to anyone that has played the game). but also this movie spends its time trying to "fill in" the non gamers of the long tekken saga and it is the combination of these two main factors that leaves the movie with a weak plot as well as poor narrative.

Returning to the positive however I would like to point out that I did admire (on a very small budget) the films attempt to make a few subtle points concerning the danger of corporations and inequality but I fear this may have been lost on most people that watched it.

So why the fresh rating ? this is probably the question that your asking reading this, well if you were expecting inception then you really shouldn't have rented this film.

I mean In my opinion this film was very entertaining and surpassed the expectations I had pressing play on my DVD player (based on previous video adaptations).

It kept my focus throughout and had moments were I could see that it had potential to be a excellent film but was let down by budgetary constraints and a poor story, still I enjoyed it and it certainly brought back memories.