Tekken: The Motion Picture

A Warrior thirsting for vengeance.  A beautiful detective looking to bring down a corporate menace.  A madman hellbent on attaining the ultimate power.  These three interlinked souls are amongst many who have come together on a far off island for the King of the Iron Fist Tournament.  Here, old scores will be settled, new rivalries will be ignited and the ultimate clash of Good vs. Evil will meet for their final battle.  And only those with the greatest of fortitudes, the mightiest of strength and the inner balance of peace and combat will survive. 

So there’s the smart approach and the lazy approach when it comes to any adaptation but specifically ones involving Video Games.  You have Pokemon: Detective Pikachu-Stories ok but the world is so visually mesmerizing you forget about it and just watch in awe at a living, breathing Pokemon world…the smart approach.  Then you have the Live Action Resident Evil Movies-Divert from the original story and sideline all of the most popular characters in favor of a bland one dimensional protagonist no one cares about…the lazy approach.  So where does Tekken: The Motion Picture fall on this little scale?  Oh it’s the latter and it’s actually so much worse than the Resident Evil movies it hurts.  Tekken might not be on the same pop culture zeigiest level of Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.  But even it didn’t deserve this absolutely trashy treatment in any way (Live Action or Anime).
 
While the movie is mercifully short, it doesn’t change the fact that Tekken: The Motion Picture manages to do so much wrong in so little time with one of the most popular fighting games in history.  Where do I even begin?  Too many characters, none of whom have a compelling arc and most are around just for fanservice (Hi King!!!!).  The three that do get the most focus are Kazuya, Jun and Heihachi and none of them deserve any of your time.  Kazuya is all angst and no substance.  Jun might look cute but her constant need to stop Kazuya from killing his clearly evil father is more annoying than meaningful.  And Heihachi, one of the fiercest and most evil antagonists in a fighting game…hardly does anything beyond throw a couple of punches and spout out dialogue a child couldve come up with while playing with his Tekken action figures.  Then you have secondary characters like Lei, who’s basically here to fill the comic relief role Johnny Cage had in the Mortal Kombat movie except he kind of just sucks.  Other popular favs like sexy sisters Nina and Anna Williams both appear too but they’re barely a footnote.  It really is just cram everyone who’s popular, or at least in the first couple of games, and hope you make everyone happy.
 
If you thought the characters were haphazardly thrown in to appease the fans, the story and art are just as poorly handled.  The movie feels like it wants to combine the stories from the 1995 Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie and produce the same crowd pleasing effect.  Instead, you recognize the familiar elements and just wish you were watching Chun Li fight Vega while listening to the kick ass Mortal Kombat theme.  It’s as lazy and basic as you can get, which can also sum up the animation.  This crappy Digi Paint style looks like absolute garbage that was rushed out from Studio Deen pretty quickly.  Also, wow Studio Deen did this?  I find it hard to believe that the studio that would one year later put out the gorgeous and damn near perfect Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal is capable of producing something so poor like this…yet here we are (I doubt any Anime Studio has a perfect track record to be honest).  Bare bones, minimalist effort, that’s your production value for this Video Game Anime feature.

Yeah this is bad, this is really, really bad.  Just because you slap a popular game title on a feature and try to cram it with tons of familiar faces and hope it works doesn’t mean it will.  Tekken: The Motion Picture lacks soul, creativity, even a sense of fun.  Even the fights feel lackluster.  Fans and non fans alike know what Heihachi Mishima is truly capable of and he feels down downplayed, so much it’s kind of insulting.  This was a rush job to cash in on the Tekken name by giving making an Anime feature and trying to make it as cool and extreme as possible.  But Ninja Scroll this is not, hell the Fatal Fury Movie was better than this garbage.  What more really needs to be said, I’m more than happy to reward this waste of no effort exactly what it deserves…
 
0/10