DVD Reviews

Tekken

I was surprised when Tekken arrived on my desk. I had literally just watched the animated film Tekken: The Motion Picture days before. This of course left me curious to see how the two compared. Which medium (animated/live action), would best do the video game justice. I’ll admit right now… I was a little surprised with what I found.

The year is 2039 and the world wars have destroyed everything and the territories are run by corporations, the mightiest of which is Tekken. In the midst of the ruined society, a young man with street smarts and raw fighting skills is driven by vengeance to defeat the world’s most elite fighters in the greatest tournament known and become the “King of Iron Fist”.

Audio comes in either English or French on Dolby Digital 5.1 channels. The tracks are about equal in quality from the short comparisons I did. The mix is a pretty good piece of audio considering it’s a low budget direct to video release. My biggest problem with the audio is that at times, the dialogue gets drowned out (muddled) by background noise or FX hits. I believe this is more from the source material than from problems with the encoding. For the most part, the dialogue is front centric and very clean, clear, audible and understandable.  I particularly enjoyed the surround usage as atmospherics were quite nice. Music sometimes made use of the rear channels and subtle crowd and street noises filled the space while bullets and action noises made directionality a part of the soundscape. Low end also packs quite a punch as you might expect from an action film. This isn’t perfect, but it’s much more pleasing than many Blu-ray tracks I’ve heard of late 

The video is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen and much like the audio, is surprisingly better than expected. Detail is very strong considering much of the film takes place in darkness lit up by nothing more than some neon signs. Colours pop and flesh tones, while they seem a little cold, look as intended as I believe this cold colouration is on purpose. Oddly enough, the film looks best when in darkness and very little light.  As soon as things get brighter, problems start to show up. There is aliasing, lines aren’t as defined as you’d like, detail doesn’t really increase when compared to darker scenes, and even some artifacting is apparent. A simple up convert solves many of the problems but without that option, it should be noted that there are visible problems.

I’m surprised to find that there are no extras of any kind on this DVD. Not even a trailer for this film or any other releases. Usually with a direct to video release like this there are a few tidbits thrown on to entice the masses to buy it. This is not in this case here.

Tekken: The Motion Picture and Tekken are very similar and yet completely different.  Both films pull from the video game by having characters, names, certain relationships between the characters and some kind of fighting tournament but when it comes to the overall story, the two part ways. Tekken starts off with a brilliant opening sequence with great editing, action and cinematography and the story is quite enjoyable until it turns into nothing more than a giant fighting tournament. Not that a fighting tournament is a bad thing. Bloodsport and films like it, have done well with the genre but Tekken just didn’t make sense. The competition and how it was setup didn’t follow any tournament I’ve ever seen and while I appreciated the attempt to show the different locals from the video game (fighting videos games have different locations/countries for each battle more often than not), it only succeeded in making the Tekken tourney look like a fighting version of American Gladiators. But the film isn’t all bad. It’s surely worth a rental but if you are planning on picking it up to add to your collection, considering spending a couple more dollars and get the Blu-ray. At least it has some extras and from what I’ve read, the video is also an improvement.

Review By Rob Harding