Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge (2014)

Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014)

Release Date: August 21, 2014

For this blog, I'm going to put in some Tekken music to listen to while you read. Let me know if you like this idea, I might do it again once in a while, though the music won't always be Tekken of course, it will be appropriate to the subject.

The Tekken film was mediocre. In all honesty, mediocre is generous. I should clarify by saying that it was actually pretty bad, but it did have two things going for it. Fortunately, one of those things was that the fight choreography was excellent, which is surely the main reason you would want to watch a Tekken film in the first place. As such, that alone is enough to elevate the film to the point that it scrapes a pass. (The first Mortal Kombat film is still better though.) I recently discovered that there was a sequel, entitled Kazuya’s Revenge. The film is actually a prequel, but the misleading title is the least of its concerns.

Kazuya Mishima (Technically, we’re not supposed to know this yet, but the title didn’t try to keep it a secret, so I’m not going to either) wakes up in a hotel room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Unfortunately, there were no hijinks the previous night that involved losing the groom the day before his wedding or stealing Mike Tyson’s pet tiger, and before Kazuya can start to think about what happened, a squadron of armed guards burst into his room, possibly to check that he isn’t trying to sneak hotel towels home in his luggage. Kazuya flees, which is an admission of guilt if that’s why the guards were there, but karma gets him intimately acquainted with the bumper of a car, and the film ends

Just kidding, Kazuya survives. When he comes to, he has been taken to the slums, where he is being held by the girls from Sucker Punch and their boss, the Minister. He asks if Kazuya is an angel, and Kazuya answers that he is not an Angel, or a Devil, or an Ogre, and he’s definitely not an Azazel, whatever one of those is. In return, Kazuya gets to ask a question.

Kazuya: Which character from the games are you supposed to be?

Minister: Excuse me?

Kazuya: I said, which character from the games are you supposed to be?

Minister: I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.

Kazuya: Admit it, you’re Wang Jinrei, aren’t you?

The Minster gives everyone that comes to his slum a new name, but Kazuya only gets a letter because he’s a weirdo who creeps the Minister out with his fourth-wall breaking. Conveniently enough, the Minister has reached K in the alphabet, and thus Kazuya is now known as K. Kazuya gets a bomb implanted in him because the Minister just watched Suicide Squad and is instructed to fight the other inhabitants of the slums, which he does for a bit. After fighting a few people, Kazuya finds an Irish accented mugger harassing a woman and beats the accent out of him, and the grateful woman becomes his friend and later, his lover. She works as a doctor, which comes in useful for removing the bomb that the Minister (who Kazuya is now convinced is Steve Fox) implanted in Kazuya, then promptly forgot about.

One of the Sucker Punch girls also takes an interest in Kazuya, and she gets him to help her with assassinations. Kazuya assassinates people for a bit, until one day, he is assigned to assassinate a character from the games. Kazuya gets very excited when it turns out to be fan-favourite Bryan Fury, as he was so desperate to meet someone at this point he was willing to settle for the universally-reviled Lucky Chloe. This works against Kazuya, as he gets so excited, he can’t focus on his mission, and Bryan escapes. Bryan then comes back to tell Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl that he escaped the slums because the Minister is bad, he knows how Kazuya can regain his memories, and he knows which game character the Minister is, but he’s not telling on the last one. It’s a secret. Armed with this new information, Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl kill the Minister.

Kazuya: I’m so sorry for killing you, Paul Phoenix, but if you’d just told me who you were, we could have avoided all this.

Minister: For the last time, I am not in the games! When will you get it through that thick skull of yours?

Kazuya: Stop lying Lei Wulong. You are in the games because Bryan Fury said so and he’s in the games, so he would know what he’s talking about.

Minister: Why can’t I die faster?

With the detour done, Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl go to the Mishima Zaibatsu, where she doesn’t fight the other Sucker Punch girls, Heihachi explains the backstory and kills the love interest, and Kazuya fights Heihachi’s two henchmen, at which point the film ends with very little resolved and no indication of how the events will lead into the film to which this is supposedly a prequel.

Before getting into the meat, I’ll rant about the title first. It’s a petty complaint for sure, but it does tie into the issues with the film itself, so bear with me. Given how the first film ended with Jin defeating Kazuya in the King of Iron Fist Tournament, costing Kazuya his position as the heir of the Mishima Zaibatsu’s fortune, you would expect a sequel entitled Kazuya’s Revenge to be about Kazuya hunting Jin down for a rematch, either by arranging another tournament, but this time with the twist of a gauntlet where Jin has to battle all the other competitors one by one, all of whom are trying to kill him, or just skipping the tournament and trying to kill Jin outright. No, it is in fact a prequel in which Kazuya is an amnesiac for most of the running time, so he doesn’t actually want revenge. Not to mention, for most of the film he is referred to as K as he doesn’t remember his name, so the title spoils what is treated by the film as a twist. The title is both nonsensical in context, and clichéd out of context, and the same could be said of the film. How so? Let us count the ways…

If an adaptation’s faithfulness to the source material is a big deal for you, you would probably get rather annoyed with Tekken, as it takes great liberties with several things, such as heroic characters portrayed as villains or most of the characters having different fighting styles to the ones they usually use. Despite that, it’s bearable in the context of the film, where the world is a terrible place ravaged by war and corruption, with precious little optimism to go around. There was a sense that the film was aware of the source material but chose to go in a different direction. The solution Kazuya’s Revenge came up with was to jettison everything from the games except for a handful of character names, and replace for a series of clichés, most of which have no business being in Tekken. These include, but are not limited to: an amnesiac hounded by armed guards for reasons he doesn’t remember, a shanty town ruled by survival of the fittest, internal bombs, an evil megacorp, a charismatic but ominous leader and flashbacks to a sterile laboratory-esque location. Only three of the characters appear in the games, of whom two (Kazuya and Bryan Fury) act completely differently from their portrayals in both the games and the first film (Film 1 Kazuya is an utter bastard who usurps his father as the main antagonist, and Revenge Kazuya is far too nice in comparison, meaning that going completely off the rails off-screen between films is implausible despite being the logical explanation for the contradiction), and two only appear towards the end (Bryan Fury again and Heihachi.) As a result, we spend most of our time with Kazuya and a host of new characters exclusive to this film, none of whom are particularly interesting. The Minister is a pretty rubbish villain because although we’re assured that he’s evil, he doesn’t do anything evil, and we’re not even told what evil things he’s supposedly done. We just have to take the film’s word for it that he’s evil, although with a name like that and the vaguely ominous aura around him, it’s pretty obvious he’s the bad guy. The Sucker Punch henchwomen are similarly devoid of character, especially the one who switches sides for seemingly no reason, as she doesn’t get any personality or character traits to justify her increased focus in comparison to the others or why she would want to change her ways. Disappointingly, none of the major villains get fight scenes, as Heihachi escapes and the good Sucker Punch henchwoman on-shots everyone else without a fight. Consequently, all the fights are against unnamed mooks and as such, the outcome is never in doubt, with choreography that isn’t as fast-paced, weighty or exciting as before and the fights are over too quickly to get excited about them anyway. Kazuya’s Revenge is an adaptation in name only, and the new material isn’t nearly interesting enough to make up for ignoring the source material so brazenly.

Despite the short running time, not much happens in Kazuya’s Revenge. After the opening sequence where Kazuya escapes the hotel, there are several scenes of him fighting people and the Minister’s henchmen killing the defeated opponent when Kazuya refuses to do it himself. After that, there are several scenes of Kazuya assassinating people. This is followed by several scenes with the love interest, and finally what passes for a plot begins in the last 10 minutes, with no time to develop it, so the beats are hit with no fanfare or attachment to what’s going on. The film doesn’t end so much as it stops when Heihachi shows up to give an exposition dump, kills the love interest with poison lip stick, then leaves while Kazuya fights two of his henchmen. Heihachi only appears in this one scene, but since he’s played by Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, reprising the role from the first film, where he was the second thing the film had going for it, he’s automatically the best thing in Kazuya’s Revenge. Fun fact, he also played Shang Tsung in the Mortal Kombat film, which honestly explains a lot of things. It makes far too much sense.

I could kinda sorta maybe see what the first Tekken film was trying to do, with its darker and edgier, more grounded take on the fighting tournament. However, I can’t say the same about the sequel. It’s a jumbled mess of elements with no cohesion to each other and nothing to do with Tekken. It’s closer to Jason Bourne than Jin Kazama, but here’s the thing: If I wanted Jason Bourne, I’d watch Jason Bourne, I wouldn’t watch a poor imitation of such, especially not when I wanted Tekken.

KO

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Game Over

2/10