This movie gets off to a subtly intriguing start, managing to build a bit of an atmosphere quite well.
Although the first half of the movie is quite creative, the second half doesn’t really develop the plot any further — it’s basically a set of related scenes, in 1 building, the whole way through after the first half hour. The action is frequent but it’s also quite gritty, so all in all I have to rate it Bang Average and if anything that’s a slight over-rating due to the genre being very good even if the plot is gravely lacking.
Although a bit aged, Antonio Banderas pulled off a few of his old Desperado type moves. Ben Kingsley was a convincing baddie – no doubt a psychopath in real life – with vibes of Anton LeVey the satanist. And Cung Le didn’t get much screen time but what he did was to a high standard even by his own standards.
Although it features Van Damme in a significant supporting role, his character only appears in occasional spells — he’s far from the main focus of this movie. Cung Le practically carries this movie singlehandedly, and that’s not a bad thing – it’s good to see him do his thing – he’s a former MMA legend (a legit champion of multiple similar combat sports) and is not a bad actor either. He also co-produced this movie himself.
By the half way mark, things have become quite interesting, as Cung Le’s humble character has managed to take over and superficially cleaned up the whole neighbourhood after beating up all the local drug dealers then making them join forces with him.
Van Damme’s son Kris Van Damme also has a minor cameo role starting about 45 minutes in.
Even though it’s not a complex movie — it’s extremely one dimensional with a consistent pace and an extremely simple plot — I’m going to rate it Above Average for being spot on with the genre and generally doing alright in sustaining attention and being mildly entertaining.
This movie begins looking like a poor level of production, as it starts to build the backstory of the dystopian world where the lead character, Jin Kazama – played adequately by Jon Foo (with vibes of Justin Chatwin from Dragonball Evolution the year before, or Michael J Fox from Back To The Future) – is constantly evading law enforcement just to put good food on the table.
When Jin’s mother dies, about 20 minutes in, and he enters the Iron Fist tournament in the Tekken estate that rules America in this dystopian world, the movie starts to come alive. In his trial to become the people’s champ, he fights Marshall Law (played by MMA champion turned moviestar Cung Le). In this bout we see many classic movies from the Tekken video game series, both on Jin Kazama’s side and on Martial Law’s side.
Naturally, people who used to play the Tekken game are going to be more into this movie than those who didn’t, and I used to be pretty good at Tekken 3 back in the day, but I quit playing PlayStation games when I became an adult! As a teenager and a master of fighting in Tekken I used to think how my life would be so much better if all the time spent mastering Tekken were spent mastering martial arts moves in real life instead. I did eventually get very good at martial arts in real life and I don’t have any regrets about quitting the PlayStation in my late teens – if anything, I should have quit computer games altogether including PC games which I wasted a lot of time on in my 20s & 30s. These days, in an effort to make better use of my time, I limit my gaming to a little bit of simple, timeless, non-addictive games like Chess (especially the Crazyhouse variant), and even Chess can be a waste of time according to arguably the most talented player of all time, Paul Morphy, who quit the game at an early age after famously saying something like “the ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman; the ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life”.
Anyway, back to the Tekken movie. The fight scene energy is generally pretty good on top of being quite true to the characters’ signature moves in the game.
I haven’t generally been a fan of Luke Goss in the lead role of action movies – he just don’t seem convincing enough – but his role here as Jin’s old-school street-smart manager suits him very well.
If not for its extremely simplistic plot, and its generally mediocre level of actors, this movie could have easily been several levels better, but as it stands, it rate it Bang Average, and that’s even a bit generous considering its poor rewatchability until you’ve almost completely forgotten how it goes.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa does a decent job as Heihachi Mishima, leader of the Tekken empire until his son steals the throne, and his son Kazuya Mishima is played quite well by Ian Anthony Dale.
The lead female, Christie Monteiro, with whom Jin gets quite close, is played by the pretty but butch Kelly Overton who based on her physique, appearance, dress style and demeanor, I’d have guessed had a background in pro (pretend) wrestling. She’s not a bad actress and in terms of star power she’s probably a good match for Jon Foo, if not a little overpowering.
Sequel
If you enjoyed this movie, don’t miss its only sequel, Tekken II: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014) which is a different kind of action movie altogether, but still quite enjoyable if you’ve not seen it before or don’t remember how it goes.
I have to say, this is a very weird movie. On the one hand it’s an eccentric satire of a kung fu come samurai flick, full of bastardised Laozi quotes, stinks of B movie vibes, and has the atmospherics of a kids’ cartoon; while on the other hand, it’s got stars like Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista and Lucy Liu, not to mention Cung Le, Rick Yune, Jamie Chung, Byron Mann, and RZA who also directed this movie and co-written it with the help of Eli Roth – a horror movie director who no doubt was somewhat responsible for the eccentric blood splattering that contributed to the weirdness of this movie.
For all these reasons, I can’t rate it any higher than Bang Average – I doubt anything in this weird genre can – but it’s also not any worse than average. Indeed, it’s probably as good as a movie can get in this weird slightly-eccentric slightly-satirical slightly B-movie type of oriental martial arts flick genre. It does a fair job of sustaining attention throughout, considering its shortcomings. I just want to know how the producers managed to convince the high level cast members – especially Russell Crowe – to get involved in such a B-movie level of production. In fairness, once they knew Crowe agreed, the rest were probably easy to convince, but how did they convince Crowe to stoop to these levels? He could have probably hired a better production team with his own money and not noticed anything missing from his fortune, so why waste his time on this tripe? I have no idea.
The quality of The Man With The Iron Fists 2 (2015) is a couple of levels down from that of the original. It has practically no special effects – just a bit of slow motion at times, and it has very little cast power too. It has a few mildly watchable parts but they’re too few & far between, and mostly too late in the movie – I had to skip through the vast majority of this movie while looking for anything watchable so I have to say the movie overall is generally unwatchable by my standards. For more than the first half of the movie, it’s pretty much solid boring drama. The last half hour or so is barely watchable, but on a better level than the prior hour.
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