Going into this movie, I wasn't expecting it to be like the game. Video Game Movies hardly ever are. So I entered this with the basic knowledge that has always been consistent. Jun Kazama has a son named Jinn who is Kazuya Mishima's son. I told myself if they messed that up, then this movie wasn't worth the trouble. Luckily they did not disappoint me.
In this movie, the world's governments fall and eight major corporations take over dividing the world up. North America was taken over by the company known as Tekken, which is the equivalent of the Mishima Corp since it is run by Heihachi. All together these companies are known as Iron Fist. They hold a competition called the Iron Fist Tournament.
After Tekken kills his mother, Jin Kazama enters the open call in order to gain revenge. He ends up in a 1v1 fight with Marshall Law. Now I don't know about you guys, but in the game this guy is a Bruce Lee knock off and annoying as hell to beat. This first real fight scene is pretty good. I'm even counting when he flashes back to when Jun was teaching him as a young kid. Well as we know he beats Law and goes on to be Jin, the people's choice, for the Iron Fist tournament.
Well the fight manager who then become Jin's manager is actually Steve Fox. Now in the game, Fox is a boxer who is an attention whore, so seeing this grunged down version really made me enjoy the character more. When they enter Tekken City and the tournament they meet the other fighters. Among them are Raven, Eddy Gordo, Nina and Anna Williams, Yoshimitsu, Dragunov, Rojo and Brian Fury. Now when I first saw this line-up I looked at the other characters in the game and shook my head. Really...they could have had a better lineup in this game.
The first fight in the tournament is with Raven and Eddy Gordo. Now I got to give props to the actor for Eddy, because he did his capoeira fantastically. But Raven...he is suppose to be a ninjutsu master, and damn it I would have liked to see some of the ninjutsu moves. I mean hell in the game he has this vanishing trick he does, can a brother at least get some nun-chucks in here? Some ninja styling please? All I saw from Raven was a bit of kicking and blocking up until he pinned Eddy and just whaled on him.
Next was Rojo and Jin, this was a little more exciting. Steve Fox gives Jin a bit of advice, but it doesn't help that much. It is only when Jin gets his ass beat and remembers his mother's training does he come out on top. And Rojo's whole two liner about about 'Do you know where you are, this is Iron Fist!'...this was totally unnecessary. I suppose at the end of this fight is when we see what the game considers 'Devil Jin' where he gets so pissed, he can almost not control himself. But unfortunately that's all we get, his anger not the full package.
Jin then gets close to his fellow competitor Christie Montiero. Now there is nothing wrong with Christie's character in the movie except for the fact that she is labeled a capoeira fighter and when she fights Nina...she does none! That was about my only complaint with her.
Now before Jin came to the tournament it was alluded to that he was intimate with a girl named Kara. What pissed me off was that they totally forgot about Ling Xiaoyu, who is supposedly Jin's love interest and childhood friend in the game. If you are going to focus the movie solely on Jin Kazama, you have to bring in the people that will build up his character development and Xiaoyu is one of them. The other being his rival Hwoarang...but I'm not going to get into that.
Now after all the bull, Kazuya takes over Tekken right out from Heihachi who is played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. I suppose they needed one famous person in there and they thought 'Hey, let's get the guy who played Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat. I mean he played a villain in that movie why not this one?' He didn't even need to act in this one. It actually looked like he was pissed he was put in that role, like they had promised him the roll of Kazuya or something then said sorry but we got this other dude doing it. But the role of Kazuya was so underplayed. All you saw of him was he was either screwing the Williams whores or being a douche in general. Kazuya is a man of action, he would be in the tournament not sending whore-class assassins and Jack-units to do his dirty work, he'd do it himself. Especially if it was to go after his son.
The martial arts in this movie is really as played up as it could be. The only time you see it is in the ring of the tournament. But I suppose in a society like that, that is the only time you would do any real martial arts. The other times it is like 'Holy shit they have guns run for your lives!'. And I'm not saying that it was bad, when they did have martial arts it was good...but it could have been better.
All in all, the grunge feel of the whole scenario was a pretty good play on how the corporations rose up and how they got this tournament, but the character development was terrible. For a movie based off the a Fighting Game, it lacked a lot of fighting. I would have enjoyed a bit more fight scenes than the club scene where Jin gets it on with Christie. I mean other than Jin's abs, Christie's ass, and some of Steve Fox's mild wit...I can say I'm glad I didn't buy this movie.
