Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

xamtaro In 1994, the success of "Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie" rocked the anime world. Three years later, ASCII and studio deen collaborated on "Tekken: the motion picture" in a possible bid to replicate the success of the previous video game anime adaptation. The result however was less than satisfying: a sub par product that was inferior in every way as an anime movie.If the opening monologue about the nature of "the tekken" (supposedly the "complete knowledge of one's flesh, blood and fist" that would be the "key to life") does not confuse you, the rest of the movie might. The story somewhat follows that of the first two Tekken games: Special investigator and martial arts expert Jun Kazama is made to join the....."Tekken" tournament hosted by the mysterious Mishima corporation under Heihachi Mishima. This is a pretense for her to infiltrate Mishima's island fortress and ascertain whether they are producing dinosaur-like bio weapons. In another part of Singapore (OMG! this anime takes place in SINGAPORE!!), Kazuya the rogue son of Heihachi Mishima is attacked by an assassin Nina. This prompts him to stowaway aboard a ship destined for Mishaima's island in order to exact his revenge upon his father.Along the way, it is revealed that Jun and Kazuya have a shared history. When they were young, Kazuya tried to help Jun. His father Heihachi saw that act as an act of weakness and, believe it or not, THREW KAZUYA OFF A CLIFF! All the while, waxing philosophical about how Lions throw cubs off cliffs as a test of strength. Thats to that event, Kazuya is now a cold heartless fighter obsessed with vengeance. Running at 60 minutes, it barely has enough time to develop the main story of Jun and Kazuya. To make things worse, other fighters like Lee (who is jealous of his brother Kazuya and wants to kill him), jack (who's story seems ripped from Terminator 2 about the machine who values human life) and Nina hog the screen time with their own little story arcs. This leads to none of their characters being fully developed. Although the voice actors do a great job, Cheesy lines about "grasping your own truth with your hands" and "don't let the darkness in your heart take over" permeate the entire narrative. Along with some drivel about machine self-awareness, justice and truth and the purpose of fighting, iT gives the feel of an anime desperately trying to sound as complex as its contemporaries. Instead it all sounds very silly and juvenile once given a little bit of thought.And then there is the animation, which looks no better than a standard 1997 TV series animation. It does not do justice to the quality of anime movies which are meant to have a bigger budget. Character movements are lazily animated, frame rate is barely adequate and the fights lack a certain energy. Every motion comes across and stiff but at least the level of detail in the art is consistent. Cost cutting techniques are obviously used. For example, Conversations involve a long pan over a still scene, Motion lines on a still picture and there are even some repeated scenes thrown in.Fans thinking that this could not be worse than the recent live action Tekken movie, think again. This is worse. Though the characters look exactly like they do in the game, the entire thing is ludicrous. Invisible dinosaurs, boxing kangaroos, cyborgs, psychic powers, devil energy, genetic alterations and Jun's ability to sense a "fighter's spirit", all concepts that are never explained. Even the final duel between Kazuya and his father is sadly anti-climatic.Tekken The motion picture fails in every way to mimic the success of Street Fighter The Animated movie despite even lifting some scenes wholesale from that anime: A nude shower scene, an attempted assassination in a bedroom and even a sumo wrestler character that parodies Street Fighter character E Honda. Overall a major disappointment, not even worth the time to watch on youtube.2/10 for this horrid let down.An extra point since its set in Singapore for 3/10

RetroActive I'm a huge fan of the Tekken series, as well as of anime movies, so it was only natural that I would see this film eventually. Here's my quick take on it.The Tekken video games, despite popular belief, have very deep storylines. There are over fifty characters, all connected to one another via relationships, grudges, sordid pasts, and anything else imaginable. The filmmakers decided to crush this level of depth into sixty minutes of screentime. Obviously, only a few of the characters could be focused on, but they made a gosh-darn good effort at trying to squeeze every last character they could in there anyway. Some fighters were touched on, then lost, others existed solely to be killed by the more popular characters. The ones that did last long enough to have a real storyline were horrendously twisted from their video game counterparts', again, all in an effort to fit as much as humanly possible into an hour long movie.The Tekken part of the movie was mangled, but sadly, also was the anime part, which could have been it's redeeming quality. In true anime style, there were long-winded speeches, sappy emotional connections, over-the-top fisticuffs, and more gore than you can shake a proverbial stick at. However, the movie takes these elements to such a level that they appear to be almost a charicature of anime. The conversations are dull and pointless, punctuated by awful voice-actors and unnecessary background music that mercifully drowns out parts of it. The emotional scenes are overdone and don't evoke any real emotions. The fights, when they do occur, consist of talking mostly, with the occasional bloody beat-down. When dinosaurs get released all over the island...well, things just get ridiculous in that department.With all the bashing this movie has received from other critics and me, don't think you necessarily have to avoid it at all costs, either. There are some good, action-packed scenes that make it almost worth suffering through the bad ones. All in all, Tekken: The Motion Picture is good, campy fun that should be seen by all fans of the games once...and only once.

jaywolfenstien This was a bad idea from the get go. Tekken is not a game that would translate to the screen very well. First of all Tekken has 20+ characters, most of which have little connection to one another so in order to get everyone on screen for a remotely decent length of time it would be a giant montage of fight scenes (because no one is about to sit through the slow development of all 20 characters out of which only 5 are worth talking about). There are too many characters to work with so it's inevitable that they focus in on a select few. But which few? Most have nothing to do with each other. Adding insult to injury, this anime also tries to morph the plotlines of Tekken 1 and Tekken 2 together. Yay, more characters. If they stuck with the Tekken 1 premise – a simple tournament and a simple father/son rivalry, this would have worked much better. They should have focused in on Kazuya's past, his rise throughout the tournament, the very beginnings of his dealing with Devil, and his confrontation with Heihachi. The narrative could stick with Kazuya as he faces off with different people and occasionally jump to other fights by the main characters thereby incorporating them into the overall story as well - then it might be worth watching.That would leave the door open for a Tekken anime sequel, it would keep the non-Tekken literate viewers informed as to the whole mythology around Tekken, and it would have been an overall better film. Also that approach would give them plenty of time to either kill off or incapacity and/or address certain characters so they don't have to deal with as many in a sequel. But nope, they tried to pack everything into one film – even Tekken 2's joke characters which had no place in the game, much less the movie. So we get lots of characters on screen who ramble and add nothing to anything and hardly ever fight despite being based on a fighting game.Another point – for one I did not like for the quality of this anime's drawing. It wasn't very inspiring. Add to that the fact all of Tekken's characters previously have been strictly CG-rendered which makes a drawn interpretation feel like a fish out of water; looking across the characters I found myself saying, `That's not Lei Wu Long; that can't be Kazuya . . .' and I couldn't buy into much of it from then on out. Final thoughts: Tekken isn't a game that lends itself too terribly well to anything other than its own medium. It's shallow as a fighting game, so it's no surprising that the anime adaptation reflects this so well.

raven-pictures Tekken the movie is based on the namco game with the same name. It features some of the best fighters in the world, brought together to compete for the title as best martial arts fighter in the world in the "Iron fist tournament".After just watching the film I feel like the producers could have done so much more with this film, it felt incomplete. The character development never worked out, the voice actors ( refering to the English version ) where awfull. Even though the animation was acceptable, it was far from good.The story was thin and never introduced you to most of the characters from the game.I would give it a 4 out of 10, sadly but true it doesn't deserve much more.