It’s a strange fact that despite fighting games arguably having the least plot of any video game genre (there’s a tournament, people fight), there is a surprisingly large amount of adaptations out there that are more than willing to make up any old guff. The two big titles – Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat – took very different routes when realising the cinematic worlds their casts of ass-kicking characters operate in. While Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and the Street Fighter gang found the square peg of their lore crammed into the round hole of a maximalist military-based actioner, the Kombat Krew hued way more to the classic nature of the button bashing source material.
This, of course, all occurred during the 90s when this whole video game-to-movie malarkey was still new, but as time moved on, did any other beat ’em up adaptions learn from these valuable lessons? In the case of 2009’s Tekken, the answer is an extremely bruising no.
The year is 2039 and World War III has been inexplicably named the “Terror Wars” because apparently WWIII isn’t terrifying enough – but worse yet, after the dissolving of the world’s governments, megacorporations have stepped up and taken over the show. The most powerful of these is the Tekken corporation and in an effort to maintain some sort of control and order, an annual fighting tournament named the “Iron Fist” occurs where the various brand names enter flashy bruisers to compete.
Within this faintly derivative world, we find Jin Kazama, a young man living in the slum area surrounding Tekken city known as the Anvil. Trying to scrape together a living running contraband across a violent landscape, Jin is proficient in martial arts thanks to his mother, but after she’s obliterated by Tekken’s fascist police force, Jin hopes to find a backdoor into the Iron Fist tournament to get vengeance on eccentric-haired chairman, Heihachi Mishima. He gets his chance after teaming with retired boxer turned sponsor, Steve Fox, and scores a shot thanks to some suspiciously tasty martial arts skills.
Soon all the fighters are assembled into one, gaudily attired, bunch and are all ready and set to pummel each other to victory. Making up their number are mixed martial artist Christine Monterio and her prominent buttcrack, sneaky cyborg Bryan Fury and the samurai Yoshimitsu , who for some reason is allowed to compete with a sword and in full armour, despite moat of the women being virtually naked. However, as the tournament continues and the stakes rise, it soon becomes obvious here that the real danger isn’t Heihachi, but with his lethally ambitious son, Kazuya Mishima, who has worrying plans for both Iron Man and Tekken itself. Adding to the cast amounts of tea being spilt is the revelation that Kazuya may have some sort of connection to Jin that goes way beyond revenge…
While video game adaptions are enjoying a burst of quality as of late, back in the genre badlands of the late 2000’s, it seems that no one had yet heeded the painful lessons learnt by the likes of Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter as Tekken jumps through the same, inadvisable hoops as it struggles to tame a typically volatile lore. While adaptations of the past tripped and stumbled while trying to figure out how to logically explain the weirdness that comes as standard with a platformer or beat ’em up, Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 crack at Mortal Kombat was a rare winner simply because it thought to embrace the chaos rather that trying to explain it away. Dwight Little’s Tekken instead bends over backwards to try and bring a game that includes fighting pandas and robot war machines back down to earth, but only succeeds in knocking the fun out of proceedings with a misplaced creative uppercut.
Swapping out the vibrancy of the game with the same, dingy, post World War III grunge that accompanied every post apocalyptic movie released during the decade, it’s actually pretty impressive the lengths Tekken takes to lance the fun out of its own concept like a boil. While removing certain, more outlandish characters may go easy on both the budget and the writers, Little’s choice to go “realistic” (those quotation marks are working overtime, let me tell you) means that not only is the lore stripped bare, but fan favorites such as the tiger-masked wrestler, King are nowhere to be seen, which is kind of like making a Street Fighter movie with Ryu but not Ken. However, while non-fans of Tekken won’t feel the loss quite so painfully, they will probably have an issue with the fact that what’s left sucks.
Relying on that tired trope of battling, all-powerful corporations manipulating everything (quite how one tournament that takes place once a year can settle anything is predictably never explained), you get the idea that even the filmmakers are unsure if their story is actually Tekken-y enough, so after naming the main city Tekken (despite the fact that it’s Japanese for “Iron Fist”) we find that literally every conversation that occurs name drops it at least half a dozen times. However, just because you have people saying Tekken all the time, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can convince people that you’re doing things right.
The performances are mostly weaker than an empty energy bar as the actors don’t even try to give these living video game fighters an actual personality. Say what you will about the ’94 Street Fighter (I know I have), but at least the characters actually felt distinct, here names such as Luke Goss, Gary Daniels and Ian Anthony Dale all play variations of the same, scowling theme while Jon Foo’s Jin is lumbered with all the whining and psycho-daddy issues of a cut price Luke Skywaker. Bizarrely, now on his second video game villain after Mortal Kombats Shang Tsung, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is blessed/cursed with a game accurate haircut that makes you wonder why they stuck with this, and left out virtually every other outlandish detail found in the games and his presence is something of a relief among the flat plotting and passable fight scenes – but considering that Dwight Little managed to cut his action teeth on Brandon Lee’s Rapid Fire and Steven Segal’s Marked For Death, the film is noticably missing any real punch.
Yet another casualty of Hollywood’s inability to understand the appeal of video games, Tekken stands as one of the worst offenders. Sure, Street Fighter, with a coked up Van Damme and a terminal Raul Julia, is legendarily awful, but at least it’s chaos can’t be described as dull. In comparison, the movie debut of Jin, Marschall Law, Bryan Fury and the rest proves to be overwhelmingly boring and you actively wonder why anyone bothered. Simply put, I’ve Tekken better shits than this…
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