Tekken, Namco's arcade game turned popular video game series for PlayStation 1-3, Xbox 360, and Gameboy Advance, will be yet another best-selling video game made into an action/science fiction film. The game's predecessors have met with mixed box office success and almost universally horrible reviews. Some games have made fairly decent movies, with Resident Evil and Hitman topping the list but by no means excellent films.
The large majority of the video-games-turned-movies — Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, two Street Fighter movies, two Mortal Kombat movies, Wing Commander, two Final Fantasy films (both animated), House of the Dead (and its made-for-TV sequel), Alone in the Dark, two Tomb Raider flicks, Doom, Dead or Alive, two awful, awful BloodRayne movies, Silent Hill, the Resident Evil sequels, and Max Payne, to name a few — are just plain terrible. The acting is usually sub-par, the plots are never interesting, and the overall product is generally genuinely sloppy.
Yet, more video game movies are on the horizon. Resident Evil will return. Others, like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Shadow of the Colossus, and Gears of War, show some promise, if the right people actually put some time into devising reasonable plots and recruiting decent casts and crews.
As for Tekken, however, the verdict is still out. Will it be a favorite or a flop?
Weinstein Company, Summit Entertainment, and Crystal Sky Pictures Team for Tekken Movie
Tekken's theatrical release date has gone from summer 2009 to fall 2009 to who knows when. Christmas 2009? Spring 2010? This is not a good sign, considering the film is completed and debuted at the Mann's Criterion Theatre in Santa Monica, California, on November 5, 2009, according to SDTekken.com. The showing was part of the AFM Film Festival. Despite this debut, the major film review websites remain silent about Tekken.
Crystal Sky Pictures, the company also pegged to distribute another video game-based film, Castlevania, joins the Weinstein Company and Summit Entertainment for Tekken. The trio will attempt to do what others before them could not — create a quality film based on a fighting game.
In doing so, they have not inspired confidence with their cast and crew selections. Director Dwight H. Little (The Phantom of the Opera, Rapid Fire, Murder at 1600) does some quality television directing, but his movies thus far have hovered between A- and B-movie quality. The same could be said of the film work of Tekken's writers, Michael Colleary, Alan McElroy, and Mike Werb, of which Werb (The Mask, Face/Off (with Colleary), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) has the most notable film experience.
The cast is filled by lesser-knowns. John Foo (The Protector, Universal Soldier: Regeneration) has had few roles that have included more than combat scenes. He will star as the film's lead character, Jin Kazama. Joining Foo will be Luke Goss, Kelly Overton, Tamlyn Tomita, Lateef Crowder, Nathan Jones, Darrin Henson, Gary Daniels, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Chiaki Kuriyama, all viewable at Freebase.com.
Can Tekken's Plot and Characters Translate into a Quality Science Fiction Film?
Tekken video games are traditional fighting games, so their plots are quite limited. In them, gamers can play as a number of different characters, each with their own motives for entering the King of Iron Fist Tournament, a.k.a. the Tekken tournament. The movie will follow Jin Kazama, a character who did not appear in the game series until PlayStation's Tekken 3. He enters the tournament to seek revenge on those who murdered his mother.
Can this premise translate into a good movie? It sounds like the premise of Mortal Kombat, where each character in the game/film entered a tournament for his or her own reasons, some, of course, being revenge. Street Fighter and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, films based on Capcom's Street Fighter fighting games, tried a different approach, creating new storylines for each character. Both Mortal Kombat, its sequel, and the Street Fighter films lacked any redeeming qualities.
Certainly, Tekken has the failures of its predecessors to overcome. If it succeeds where the others could not, Tekken would surely surpass even the most optimistic expectations. More likely, it won't surpass even the lowest expectations.
Jason Parent - Jason Parent earned his Bachelor's Degree in English in 2000 and his Juris Doctorate in 2006. He currently works as an attorney with a ...
