Review: Tekken the Movie

The Review is after the jump.




Just finished watching Tekken the Movie. As video game movies go I have to say it was very good, but that's not saying much. For those of you who have never played the Tekken games (me) the movie takes place in a future world ruled by corporations. The largest corporation Tkeen contorls most of North American and everyone seems to speak japanese there. Our main character Jin has an English accent and seems to only care about money.

Well not just money

Shit happens, he buys coffee from a crack dealer (no joke) blah blah and his mother is killed by the Tekken police aka Jackhammers. You could say she got.... hammered.



So he decides to join the Tekken hosted tournament and he meets a bunch of people and beats people up, there's also the obligatory twist and lost legacy stuff that usually happens in fighting games.

So most of you who have actually been reading up to here must be thinking its a stupid game to movie adaptation. The acting must be as expressive as Arnie with the scripting of... Arnie. But for themost part you'd be wrong. I'm not the most optimistic guy in the world so I went into Tekken thinking it was going to be horrible. But the acting is not bad. The actors are familiar, legitimiate actors. You see, usually in these martial arts movies they choose martial artists as the actors and train them to act, which as evidenced usually works like crap. With Tekken they found actors like Kelly Overton, Mircea Monroe.

Pictured above: Actors know for their acting.

But seriously, the film wasn't a full female cast (I'm looking at you Dead or Alive), Jin (Jon Foo), the main character has impressive crediting for a relative unknown, he was in Tom Yum Goong and Batman Begins among other stuff. Also starring was Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the old asian dude who seems to play all the old asian dudes in movies.



Some of you might also know Lateef Crowder, veteran martial arts movie villain who makes a cameo.

Now the most important thing for any fighting movie is NOT the fanservice, plot, or gratuituos slow-mo. I look for good fight scenes. The casting for this movie was as good as it can get for a low budget game to movie adaptation. The actors had decent acting skill but they were trained very welland the scenes were choreographed nicely. The fights were not creative like in Unleashed or Ong Bak but they were well planned out and nothing was too exxagerated. Some of the stunts were unrealistic enough to seem like they were on strings.

And now we come to where im supposed to tell you guys whether or not to watch it. I watched this movie at home and not in theaters. I would recommend the same for you.

If you actually took my advice and watched it koodos. If you've already watched it or just wanna comment then put it in the comments.