Film Reaction: TEKKEN 2: KAZUYA'S REVENGE

 Hooray for lazy re-used art assets!

Okay then.  I can do this.  I can do this.

For those of you not as prone to chasing up every Tekken-related newsbit as I am, here's a quick catch-up: the earlier Tekken movie, released in either 2009 or 2010 by Crystal Sky Productions, made virtually no money in its super-limited cinema run before heading to DVD markets, but producers are a funny lot who can make excuses for anything, so somebody decided they really needed to keep hold of the license rights.  A couple years pass and some word-of-mouth goes around about a planned prequel movie titled Tekken: Rise of the Tournament, with Ong-Bak's Prachya Pinkaew set to direct.  Some people (me, mostly) get a bit excited.  This movie does not happen.

Months later, actor/martial artist Kane Kosugi excitably blabs about getting the lead role in Tekken: The Man Called X.  Most assume this is the prequel under a new title.  A few days after that, Kosugi's talent agency issues a retraction, saying the film is actually titled Agent X and has nothing to do with the Tekken license.  The production goes on with little to no further notice.

Finally, in August 2014, the film's trailers debut little over a week from its planned straight-to-video release...and announce it as Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge.  No sign of anyone called X anywhere but Kosugi is definitely front and center.  I have watched it.  Now you watch as I attempt to make sense of it all.

 Three point landing, or trying to pick up contact lens while

pretending you don't actually wear them?

The Plot:  We return to 'The Anvil' - the slum town built outside the guarded walls of Tekken City - at some point in the past, which is actually still our future oh god this is already killing me.  A man (Kane Kosugi) wakes up in a high-rise flat, which I guess is still technically a 'slum', with no memory of his identity or how he got there besides flashes of conflict and war.  He is quickly set upon by paramilitary types, makes a run for it, and is captured by a woman named Rhona (Kelly Wenham), who takes him to the Minister (Rade Serbedzija) - a madman who trains the lost into hitmen for unknown clients.  Initially rejecting the idea, the amnesiac man - named simply 'K' for being the Minister's 16th acquisition - is forced to comply with the killings, but over time begins to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding himself and this deadly organisation...

Wow, I almost made that sound good.  I'm on fire today.

 This is a picture of a lady.  She appears cross with someone.

Look, the film didn't release many good promo shots, okay?

The Good:  Uhm...

Okay, if I look hard enough, I can find good in anything.  Firstly, at least some of the cast seem enthusiastic about what they're doing.  Serbedzija is plainly having a whale of a time as the Minister, hamming it up marvellously - and with a villain whose schtick is as dumb as 'trains assassins and uses religious vocabulary and conventions for no apparent reason' ham is the best route to take.  Both Wenham (as Rhona) and Paige Lindquist (as a more generic love interest) are not exactly great actors but they're trying to wring some emotion out of what they're given and...kinda succeed.  I respect the effort.  The Minister's tag-along henchwomen/arm candy, played by Charlotte Kirk and Biljana Misic, don't have any sort of character development and barely any dialogue but they're shockingly personable, especially Kirk, with her bratty laughing, skipping and sadistic applause.  And Cary Tagawa really could've phoned this one in, but apparently his pride wouldn't let him as he gives his best lip-curling sneer and throaty-gargle villain voice in his relatively sparse appearance.

Also, the plot deserves a mention, because however stupid it is, and however little it has to do with the games ('very' to both), if you think about it enough it does kinda resemble a Tekken story, or at least a skewed Earth-2 version of a Tekken story (which is basically what Tekken 2010 was).  According to the long-upheld canon of the games, Heihachi found his son Kazuya to be disappointing in some nonspecific way, and so threw him off a cliff as a child, figuring he'd either die, or survive and grow stronger as a result.  This did not end well for anyone.  (also this plot is due to be dragged up again for Tekken 7 and will likely be changed in some way as a result, but for now, that's what we know)

***SPOILERS AHOY***

The eventual reveal in Kazuya's Revenge is that, yes, movie Heihachi was also disappointed in Kazuya, although he waited to sort him out 'til the kid grew up, at which point he used electroshock therapy to at least temporarily wipe his mind before arranging for him to fall into the Minister's clutches (it's not directly confirmed but heavily implied the Minister is 100% Heihachi's stooge) and go through a trial by fire in order to turn him into a deadly warrior without conscience.  The method is different - more 'gritty' and other trendy terms, but also not requiring a big-ass cliff or an appearance by the Devil himself since the budget's very tight - but the intent and eventual result are mostly the same.  It's almost enough to make me think this script totally didn't start life as a completely-unrelated-to-Tekken movie!

 Tekken's Harley Quinn Paris Hilton in DEATH BY LOLLIPOP:

a new spin-off title coming Summer 200never!

The Bad:  This script absolutely started life as a completely-unrelated-to-Tekken movie.  The whole whopping 3 characters from the games aside, there's little attempt to link what's happening here to any event from any point in the games' story or, more critically, the events of the previous film.  Sure, it's a prequel, of course the world will be a little different, but here it's so different it's unrecognizable.  'K' may be in a slum town but...well, he's not, really.  There's that high-rise flat he wakes up in, a fairly modern nightclub, and apparently some sort of science lab with hologram screens (which admittedly was filmed using a barely disguised abandoned council building but still), none of which would have existed in 'the Anvil' we were introduced to before - a place where TVs were so scarce that people would stand around in the street craning their necks at big TitanTron screens up high, and where even the friendly bars look like a bomb made of random car parts exploded inside them.  And no, before you ask, at no point do we visibly move inside the walls of Tekken City (which doesn't really exist except as a dodgy CG backdrop) so this is all definitely supposed to be the slums.  Not to mention that all the civilians, while visibly impoverished, seem to be getting along with their lives just fine (K's neighbour is taking medical classes!) without the constant threat of masked stormtroopers showing up to drag people off into the night and open up with automatic weapons in public.  And yet we see archive footage from Tekken 2010 during K's flashes of old memories, including the Jackhammers, and if so, where the hell did all this stuff go?  Is that all happening in the West Anvil and we're stuck in the East?

Ditch the Tekken connections and you'd still have an incredibly dull entry into the 'forced to fight' subgenre with little to recommend it.  The story glides by with little momentum, and characters simply don't get enough room to breathe to make their eventual fates (one way or another) mean anything.  One guy in particular (dodging spoilers) is given what's meant to be a deep monologue scene with K only to be killed all of five minutes later; it's a cheap stab at emotion, but it could work if the speech is good and delivered with verve.  It isn't and it isn't, so the mechanical nature of proceedings is too exposed to let the viewer be lost in it.  It's also an incredibly short script, leading to all manner of padding being employed, but I'll talk more about that when I cover direction.

 Another picture of a lady.  Honestly, the girls are the best thing

about this movie even when NOT sopping wet.

Onto Kosugi.  Look, I said before when talking about this film that he's at least a pretty good actor and a really good martial artist, and I do stand by that, but this script is not giving him much to work with.  Apparently the best way he and the filmmakers could think of to depict identity loss and the resultant breakdown was to just wander around town in slow motion with a blank look on your face.  For most of the runtime Kosugi resolutely refuses to emote except for during fight scenes, and it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, not to mention the viewer's attention.  Why care about the plight of this guy if he himself isn't prepared to care about it?

Also I've got to address Rhona because this is pissing me off.  Firstly, she gets a bit of decent backstory added in by way of clunky exposition talk: apparently she's one of a pair of sisters who live with a single father, but the other sister betrayed her and arranged her abduction by the Minister.  Now, ignoring how much that sounds like it could be a set-up for her to actually be one of the Williams sisters (she's not), it sounds like foreshadowing, right?  Clearly this evil sister of hers is going to turn up later as a stooge to the big villain so Rhona can have a cathartic brawl at the climax.  She's almost the co-lead of the film, given how much screen time she gets, so that's not an unreasonable assumption.  Buuuuuut, as it turns out, the sister never turns up and that particular chunk of character detail is never referenced again.  What the hell was the point, then?

Do not be fooled by this pic.

The camera stays still for only 0.25 seconds per fight sequence.

Kazuya's Revenge was directed by one Wych Kaos, 'best' remembered for Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, a Lucy Liu/Antonio Banderas actioner that basically killed both their lead-star careers and bombed so hard it made a mushroom cloud.  I've never actually seen that one, and I'm not exactly in a hurry to, but if the effort shown here is Kaos after having learned some important lessons from past failure, then...he clearly didn't learn enough.  There is no particular logic or craft to his shot setups; it's just 'wherever we can fit the camera and see all the actors from'.  His scene transitions have no sense of urgency or pace, he shows no indication of the movie's geography, and worst of all for a film like this, he has no idea how to shoot a fight scene.  The cuts are far too quick, the camera far too wobbly, and he has a weird tendency to crash-zoom on every striking limb that's incredibly disorienting and does more to hide what might well be impressive choreography than highlight it.

Kaos' technical team didn't exactly help much either.  Misha Segal's score isn't exactly a distraction, but it's so low-key it might as well have been left out.  And the editing...ay yi yi.  As I said before, this film's script is too damn short by a fair margin, so the filmmakers got around that in the fashion parodied by Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, i.e. show as many scenes in slow motion as possible.  The slo-mo does not offer any greater sense of tone or character; it's just shots of Kosugi walking around dusty streets and by a train track viewed at less than half speed so it'll take longer.  Couple that with the archive footage from Tekken 2010 and, even more annoyingly, repeating scenes from earlier in the film for little to no reason, and they likely added a full 10 or 15 minutes onto the movie (and it totals in at only 89!) that's completely inert.

Bonus bad: what the hell happened to Heihachi and Bryan Fury?  I can understand and begrudgingly accept both lacking their signature visual styles (you can just about justify it by the time-gap between this and Tekken 2010) but they're completely different characters.  Tagawa's Heihachi was a strict and unlikable man, but with a sense of honour and decency; he built Tekken City not intending to force the rest of the country to live like hobos but to protect the minority he felt was most necessary to rebuild the world.  Here, he's a goddamn pantomime villain who kisses a woman to death and also teleports (?) (that may just have been shit editing again) and generally couldn't be more of a heel if he tried.  Bryan goes in the opposite direction; instead of an immoral scumbag using biomechanics to cheat at tournament fighting, he's an honest-hearted fugitive who escaped the Minister's clutches and helps put K on the right trail for his eventual climactic showdown.  The only thing identifying this guy as Bryan is it's still Gary Daniels in the role.

Bonus bonus bad: the climax.  I can accept Heihachi pulling a Cobra Commander and hightailing it instead of trying to fight K himself, but if you're gonna do that, you'd better have him leave the hero in some sort of certain-death scenario.  'Fight two random unannounced guys at once' is not that big a deal to a bloke who's already fought way more guys than that.  And meanwhile, Rhona deals with the Minister's henchwomen by punching one once (once!) and just walking up to the other and choking her.  No fighting involved in either case.  What the actual hell.

This is absolutely the face Heihachi makes when he's watching you pee.

The Verdict:  The only reason Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge isn't an agonizing experience is that it's so slovenly paced it lulls you into a trance, to the point where genuine pain and anger simply cannot register.  It strips away all that you are and leaves you with nothing but the continued beating of your heart and breathing of your lungs to identify you as not dead.  It's the Anti-Life Equation of action movies.  I'm giving it 2 out of 10 because, honestly, the girls are actually kinda interesting even though nothing else is.

If you're actually interested in this kind of movie, though, might I recommend another I've recently watched - Bangkok Revenge?  Not planning to do a full write-up for it, but suffice to say it plays with some of the same ingredients as this does (i.e. a man with muddled memories and martial arts skillz stuck in a rundown town bringing punchy justice to bad people and unravelling a conspiracy) but is far better written, staged and directed, and the fight scenes are fantastic.  And as a bonus, it stars Jon Foo, who played Jin Kazama in Tekken 2010, so you can pretend it's also a disguised Tekken movie!  A much better one!

And if so, the guy in drag with the sledgehammer is totally movieverse Marduk.  Has to be.

Yup, that's basically how this film makes you feel.