Once upon a time in a land far, far away someone decided to
adapt these newfangled video games to the magic of the silver screen. At the
time, video games weren’t exactly story driven and the most popular of these
were simply things like a yellow pie shape eating dots in a maze or a slightly
obsessed Italian plumber navigating an under-construction building while
avoiding a never ending supply of barrels that were left at the top along with
a very angry gorilla. If you were going to adapt them, you were going to have
to fill in more holes than “Load Runner”.
Modern video games make things a bit easier by providing
back-stories, but any time a movie is adapted from a book, a game, a cartoon,
whatever, there are going to be changes, it’s a fact inherent of the medium.
Even if you do something incredibly faithfully (say, 2009s WATCHMEN or 2012s
THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS), there will be those that are furious that one little
detail has been slightly altered. Don’t be that guy.
That said I have a confession to make. I’m not a fan of the “Tekken”
games. I know there are legions of them and I know they are vociferous.
Understand I don’t hate them, I just never could get into them. Because of this
I’m going to leave the ranting about the differences between the movies and the
games to the people who sit around on message boards trying to pick fights with
anyone who dares to have a slightly different viewpoint.
TEKKEN (2009) served as the first live-action version of the
game. Directed by veteran genre director Dwight H. Little, it envisioned the
King of the Iron Fist tournament to be an underground bloodsport in the year 2039.
Taking place within the walled city-corporation of Tekken, it is overseen by
the fascist Heihachi Mishima (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Within the walls of Tekken
City, corporations and the wealthy lived in luxury while outside the walls, the
lower classes live in filthy, abject poverty. Mishima’s death squads would
frequently kill civilians for apparently no reason whatsoever, instigating
riots and unrest. In one of these situations slum-dweller Jin Kazama (Jon Foo)
sees his mother killed and sets out for revenge by entering the tournament as a
way to get close enough to Mishima to kill him. Even though I am not much of a fan of the game, I've played it enough to know that they at least got the look of the characters right. Even SUPER MARIO BROTHERS (1993) managed to screw that up somehow.
Badly scripted and terribly acted with “futuristic” clichés flying
fast and furious, Little at least made the fight scenes interesting. Not
exactly great, but better than the average DTV fodder. Pilloried by fans of the
games and completely dismissed by everyone else, we flash forward five years and suddenly have a sequel. Well, actually, a prequel. I know the title
is TEKKEN 2, but it’s a prequel. Not that it matters in the least.
Set in an unidentified time frame that we know is prior to
the original only because the marketing says so, a man suffering from amnesia (Kane
Kosugi) wakes up in a hotel room in the slums with a Tekken death squad running
up the stairs. After fighting off the troopers, he is knocked cold by a hot
brunette in a pleather outfit. Waking up, once again, the man finds himself
tied up in the courtyard of a man called The Minister (Rade Serbedzija). The
Minister alleges to preach the word of god and dubs our amnesiac “K” (since he
is the 16th recruit).
After telling K that there is a bomb
implanted in his chest and demonstrating its cranial combustion ability on a
guy he didn’t like, he tells K “By the sweat of your brow shall you labor until
you return to the ground.” To which K replies “You crazy!” If K didn’t state
the very obvious, he would have no dialogue whatsoever.
What this all boils
down to is the fact that The Minister is going to use him as one of his hitmen. His stable of killers take out the people that The Minister is paid to hit. Though he doesn't do children. No children! Well, unless the price is right (not that this movie dares to show him having kids killed). His current top killers include a woman dressed up as a school girl (Charlotte Kirk), who sucks
a lollypop and uses her feminine wiles to lure men to their deaths, which of
course we have never, ever seen
before. Apparently this heinous cliche is not even related to the game in any way. Seriously, I wish "Sukeban Deka" had never been made.
The Minister keeps K locked up in a cage until he has proven
that he can, I guess, stumble blindly into places where people are going to
fight him. One such place has been cleverly decorated to appear like a very
small warehouse lined with steel barrels. Presumably these are intended to be settings
from the video games, but they get absolutely no set-up and while I realize
this is supposed to be a slum, the sets are impoverished at best. Since K has
no memory, we get no backstory and little dialogue. What dialogue we do get is
so inept that it borders on legendary. A character called The Janitor (Sahajak
Boonthanakit) is introduced specifically so that he can give his backstory to
break the monotony and have exchanges with K, such as this one:
K: “What is this place?”
Janitor: “To some it is home, to others it’s a prison.”
Thank you for that enlightening pearl of wisdom.
Also to fill in the void, we have The Minsiter rambling
incoherently over a PA system saying that people should kill each other in
order to “stop the violence”. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be part of
his nutty character, or whether it is just an indication that the script was
scratched out on the back of a cocktail napkin the day before shooting. To give
context to this monologue, we get a few random scenes of people in the compound
killing other people. Why? To stop the violence, of course. Did someone really
get
paid to write this?
In addition to the fact that K has nothing to say and his
expression never changes, every scene is weighed down by somber music and slow
motion walking, looking and standing, desperately trying to give the film a
serious and emotional tone that would be utterly laughable if it wasn’t so
dull. The only emotion wrenched out of the audience is due to the fact that they are bored to
tears.
K kills a couple guys in a PG-13 kind of way and is allowed to have
an apartment with a hot neighbor who he saves from some British bullies. See?
Just because he murders people, he ain’t a bad guy! Conveniently she also works at a clinic which qualifies her to remove explosive implants. Finally we get some
flashbacks of K in a chair with bandages around his head and Mishima (who they
couldn’t even bother to make up to look like Tagawa’s character in the first
film) berating him for being weak. Oh, and we also get flashbacks to the scenes
we just saw! The most cruel of blatantly obvious padding ploys. This movie is
slower than a short bus with two flat tires and a broken axle. It literally
takes 70 minutes to get anywhere near something that resembles a “plot”.
You’d think that at least the fights and assassination scenes
would be a break from the monotony but writer Nicole Jones-Dion (also
responsible for the previous year’s DTV turkey DRACULA: THE DARK PRINCE) insists
on making it as lethargic as possible. In one sequence K is required to kill
the owner of a “gentleman’s club” in which girls in bikinis do not strip, but
stand around looking as if they are waiting for some stage direction. K doesn’t
even bother to try to look like a club-goer, staring in every direction to find
the owner, who spots him immediately and sends his bodyguards after him. Ok, I
hear you say, this should make for the time honored bar-fight scene in which
many liquor bottles will be put to death. Sucker! Nope, we cut to K breaking
the owner’s neck while the bodyguards look at the ceiling in bewilderment.
Director Wych Kaosayananda's dubious claim to fame is having made the big budget trainwreck BALLISTIC: EKS VS SEVER (2002), which was made for $70 million and returned $7 thousand on its opening weekend. It took him ten years to get someone to bankroll another film which turned out to be another disasaster and yet somehow he managed to land this job. Clearly the producers didn't care about anything in this movie other than the title. If you are looking for the epitome of "shameless cash grab" this is it.
Even worse, when there is a fight scene, they are brief and badly shot. Kaosayananda's is one of those directors that
feels that if the camera is not moving he is not doing his job. The only time
it is still is during “dramatic” scenes in which people walk determinedly in
slow motion. In Parma, Italy, the thought is that anyone can make prosciutto by
burying it in salt. It takes a real craftsman to cure the leg with a small
amount of salt. In other words, have the good sense to allow the ingredients to
do their job, don’t go overboard like a clumsy oaf. During the brief bits of
action, Kaosayananda loves to assemble over-edited close ups of hands and feet,
and do shots that start at the feet and quickly pan up to the faces during the
fight. This results in a hodge-podge mess that does a disservice to the talented
martial artists that he hired to do the fights in the first place.
Kane Kosugi may not be in any danger of being winning an Olivier
Award, but since the writer has no idea what to do for a plot and uses the
conceit of amnesia as an excuse to not have one at all, this means that Kosugi
must be stonefaced through the entire film up until the final couple of minutes
where he actually gets angry because he finds out why he has amnesia. Not that
it really matters then, because there is no resolution due to the fact that it
is a prequel! Instead of a showdown with a boss character at the end with an opening for the sequel/original movie, he simply fights a couple of random dudes who walk in from off screen! That said it is the best fight scene in the movie, but I think it's apparent that none of the fights had much time to choreograph and reherse, as we have seen much better out of Kosugi in
NINJA II (2013).
Not content to tarnish the Kosugi name, Kaosayananda has
Gary Daniels pop in for a completely pointless bit part as Bryan Fury, one of
The Minister’s escapees. I get that he is supposed to be foreshadowing his part
in the original film, but they can’t even be bothered to get him into make-up
and costume! It looks like he was on his way to the grocery store and stopped
by to shoot a few scenes. As if that wasn't bad enough he is saddled with dialogue that does neither him or the audience any favors. When telling K that he escaped from The Minister, he says "Trust me. I'm your only friend. And I'm not your friend." Huh? Who thought that looked good on paper?
The original title for the film was TEKKEN: A MAN CALLED X, which
should give you a clue as to the mess that the movie is since throughout the
majority of the movie he is a man called “K”. TEKKEN 2 desperately wants to be
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012) and is not even close. Not even in the same
ballpark, not even in the same league, not even in the same sport. I could
completely forgive the total lack of production values (oooh, another fight on
a patch of asphalt!) and the clueless, meandering script if they had shot some
good fight scenes. That’s all I ask. I’m easy, I don’t care if you don’t
actually have any real connection to the game, just don’t waste Kosugi and
Daniels. That’s it. Instead we get what is without question going to be the most
tedious action movie of the year. Ok, maybe that’s not true. I did see the
life-draining Renny Harlin SOV actioner 12 ROUNDS (2009) this year, but then
again you can’t really say John Cena was wasted in it.
Sadly Kosugi and Daniels’ next film will be in Kaosayananda’s
latest (technically his previous), ZERO TOLERANCE, which started life as a film titled ANGEL. The film was
released only in Vietnam in 2012 and has subsequently been in another post production after
getting a major overhaul with Scott Adkins being involved in the reshoots. Even
though heavy re-edits and re-shoots are usually the kiss of death, I figured
with Kosugi, Daniels and Adkins in the ranks, it couldn’t be all bad. After
seeing this sloppy, half-assed mess, I can't imagine what sort of disaster ZERO TOLERANCE will turn out to be. I may have to hand that one over to Will to
review. I don't think I can bear to see the dream team of Kosugi, Daniels and Adkins ruined by this man. Besides, misery loves company.