Tekken

tekkenpic Video games, in the last decade or so, have expanded the narrative possibilities of the media form, or dare I say in opposition to Roger Ebert, have advanced the capabilities of the medium to make it a true art form. Video game films, on the other hand, have been taking decidedly smaller steps forward, and as a viewing of Tekken will show, sometimes don’t know which way is forward or back.

A major problem in video game adaptations has been the choice of source material. Of course the other end of the equation, how the source material is adapted, has been another major stumbling block, as Uwe Boll has generally defined the tone of these adaptations. But selection has often been based on the most popular, yet narratively thin games, rather than games with rich content and mythology.

Consider the work of such game studios as Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Bioware, which have created expansive new worlds with engrossing mythologies and amazing filmic sequences. And then look at the games that have been getting adapted, these films’ adaptations seemingly green-lighted because of their popularity more than their narrative possibilities (of course a lot of other games are both narratively expansive and wildly popular, but for some reason those games have yet to be adapted. Those that were, like Max Payne, flubbed their adaptations, while the recent Prince of Persia worked, but merely as a Bruckheimer summer blockbuster). So while I wait with bated breath for the adaptations of Mass Effect, Halo, and Assassin’s Creed, among other films, we have Tekken.

Tekken, as of my last playing, has already released a sixth installment of its franchise. And I will admit to playing it a bit, though not really knowing much about the back stories of the characters. It was just, well, kind of cool to look at and nifty to rack up combos.

It’s worth noting that it is an adaptation of a fighting game, which for the uninitiated means that you have at the core of the genre, two characters onscreen, either controlled by one player and a computer, or two players, who just beat the crap out of each other by employing basic strikes, combos, and special moves. Previous to Tekken, there are three other fighting game adaptations that I have seen, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and DOA.

Fighting games give their characters back stories, but usually these can be told in the span of a twenty second cinematics sequence, and when you finish the game the resolution of their stories can be compressed into about thirty seconds. Suffice to say that fighting games aren’t too concerned with telling stories, they are all about cool fighting moves and combos and stuff that looks awesome when you’re trying to kick someone’s ass.

So I was quite ready to be forgiving of the film Tekken if it was lacking in depth of story. Really. I was willing to let it get away with stuff if it was smart enough not to take itself too seriously, as did DOA.

And that’s where Tekken begins to fumble, and never stops fumbling thereafter. It wants to be taken seriously when it’s a mishmash of premises and it attempts to cram in a story of totalitarian control and revolution with a game that’s mainly about putting two characters onscreen and letting ‘em wail on each other.

We’re given a world that has crumbled after some war or other, one that has been remade and defined by the various corporations. The thing is that the world doesn’t fully make sense. We just know that everyone on the outskirts, referred to as the Anvil, kind of dresses in leather and denim and all of them look kind of greasy like they aren’t being rationed water for bathing. Then you’ve got the people who are under the control of Tekken. I don’t know exactly what they look like, who they are, or what it takes to live in the city, but apparently it’s much better than living in the Anvil, but the costs are undefined. We just know that the Anvil looks like a bunch of shanties, while the Tekken-sponsored folk inhabit the skyscrapers of the city. Again, the dynamics of this aren’t exactly clear, but we’re supposed to believe that Tekken is an oppressive corporation that we’re supposed to hate, because corporations are bad, and these greasy people on the outskirts are the future and the revolution.

Enter main character, Jin, who works as a runner, smuggling tech or something. In the opening scene we’ve got him running around the slums being chased by a gang (unclear why they are chasing him) and by the Tekken-soldiers referred to as Jacks (well, he stole something from Tekken, so that kind of makes sense). Jin sells the stolen round thingy that’s supposed to be something like the internet and gives it to the revolutionaries for money. They tell him he’s a closet revolutionary, and he says he’s just thinking about himself, he’s not part of any revolution.

Then Jin goes to the bar where he’s accosted by two dudes for not joining the revolution. He reiterates that it isn’t his fight (ah and you know where this is going right?) and then he goes home and gets in a shouting match with his mom because she wants him to stay home because of a curfew, but he wants to go out and shag his slightly cleaner-looking girlfriend.

While he’s shagging his girlfriend the revolutionaries get shot up by the bad guy (you know he’s the bad guy because he’s wearing a long coat and a goatee, and he delivers bad lines like, “The revolution will not be televised” while shooting some dude in the face) and a team is sent to capture Jin at his home. The team finds his mother there. He realizes, mid-coitus, that those helicopters overheard are meant to kill him and not his mother, so he rushes home just in time to see, and get this because this is a friggin’ big one you’re gonna love it, he gets home just in time to WATCH HIS MOTHER GET BLOWN UP WITH A MISSILE.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s messed up. His mother gets blown up right in front of him with a missile. And I suppose it should be kind of tragic, but when you think about it, it’s kind of absurd and funny. It could have been great camp. But the film decided to take this seriously, and use this as the motivation that radicalizes Jin. After watching his mother get blown up, Jin decides to fight Tekken Corp. by joining the annual Iron Fist tournament. Yeah I know, other people start up revolutions and stuff, but this dude decides to join a fighting tournament. Why? Well, because that’s the game’s format.

And from there we get one hardly coherent fight scene after another. And more unmotivated action by characters, And a healthy serving of really bad dialogue. I won’t bother to tell you any more of the story, because after hearing how it starts out, you should get a sense that the rest of it is just more of this crazy narrative drivel. There’s a girl of course. And some other bad dudes. And some dudes who help Jin. And stuff. While there’s a lot of fighting.

There’s some revelation about the mother, but more troubling is the way in which the mother keeps reappearing in the film. Like our own action stars, Jin usually lets himself get beaten up a while. And then, when he’s on the brink of really getting messed up, a flashback comes in. In these flashbacks we are shown the mother training him and giving sage advice like “As long as you’re breathing you can fight,” or “Every enemy has its weakness.” (The “its” seems to be deliberate, as opposed to the more common “his” because apparently she had the foresight to know that when he would need this particular piece of wisdom in his life Jin would be fighting a cyborg.) Of course after this happens a couple of times you can predict how all the other fights are going to play out.

This isn’t the only troubling thing about the fight sequences. The movie assumes that all its viewers suffer from ADHD because it uses multiple cut-to-cuts, shaky cam, and an incessant stream of unnecessary reaction shots. In the span of a few kicks or punches we’ll get three or four reaction shots, of the crowd, of the girl, of the bad dude, of people in a bar, and well, of all these other things. At the same time, the shots of fighting seem to be terribly impatient, never settling on an angle to give us action, but just giving us multiple angles which never help us to piece together what exactly is happening. Furthering this sense of confusion is the camera that just won’t keep still, that gosh darned shaky cam just won’t steady itself long enough so that we can get a sense of what’s going on.

So that pretty much killed the film. I’m willing to forgive the most inane of concepts as long as I am treated to some great action sequences. And I wasn’t expecting much from Tekken other than that it show me some cool ass-kicking in the tradition of its source material. The action here is pretty standard fare, mediocre in its execution, and made even worse by the way that it is so ineptly shot. One of the cool things about the game was how it incorporated various fighting styles. While the film mentions the different fighting styles, you can’t ever differentiate them because of the way that it’s all presented. It doesn’t help that there are a number of shots when it’s clear that they are really pulling their punches.

I wasn’t expecting to be moved, to be brought to some kind of epiphany, to come across a realization about humanity, through the course of Tekken. All I wanted was to be entertained and to see some really good fight sequences. I am well aware that this is a product meant to appeal to ten- to eighteen-year-olds, which explains a lot of the simplistic motivations, broad strokes in storytelling and characterization (not to mention all the weird daddy-issues), and, well, a lot of shots of scantily-clad hot women in really really hot positions. But I did hope that it would hit that bare minimum of fun factor through hard hitting and novel action sequences. As it stands, Tekken is probably taken best as something that you can play in the background while you’re waiting for your turn to play the actual game.

Photo taken from tekkenpedia

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