TEKKEN 2: KAZUYA'S REVENGE (2014)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Since I don't pay any attention to how much video-game films resemble the original games, I suppose I shouldn't care that much when the separate installments of those films don't resemble each other. Still, upon looking at my review of the 2010 TEKKEN, I noticed that the villain of that film is a guy named Kazuya, who's also the father of the martial hero Jin. So is TEKKEN 2: KAZUYA'S REVENGE a prequel to TEKKEN, purporting to tell how the later film's villain came to be, a la the Second STAR WARS trilogy? If so, the writers of REVENGE had absolutely no idea how to pull off that sort of experiment. A lot of people didn't like Second STAR WARS for assorted reasons, but at least no one was ever unclear about the trilogy's purpose of telling the origin of Darth Vader.

What the viewer gets in this TEKKEN prequel is an hour and a half of the amnesiac protagonist K (Kane Kosugi) wandering around like a somnambulist for most of the film, except for occasional burst of kung-fu violence. This story too is set in the future but one can barely tell, since it's all on cheap street-sets and in various warehouse-looking buildings. K wakes up in a hotel room, not even knowing his name. Cops burst in for some reason and the bemused fellow runs for it. A gang of kung-fu assassins abduct him and their leader, The Minister, gives the amnesiac his letter-name (the same sort of names he gives to his other followers), and invites K to join them in their quest of assassinating bad people. K doesn't have anything better to do, so he hangs around, even though he doesn't like the idea of killing. (Guess his personality took a big change in time for the movie.) There are some nice-looking women in the gang, though K doesn't seem to be interested in any of them, even though one of them, Rhona (Kelly Wenham) seems interested in him.

One online review sports the theory that the story began as an independent project and was forced into the TEKKEN franchise to make it more salable. This makes a good deal of sense, and not only because there's no real payoff when K finds out that he's Kazuya, who will eventually be the villain of the 2010 film. In addition, actors Gary Daniels and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa play roles approximately like those they essayed in TEKKEN, but both could have been written out of the story easily.

Kane Kosugi, offspring of Sho "REVENGE OF THE NINJA" Kosugi, is one of the most inert actors I've ever seen, even when he's doing his kung fu action. Beside him, Kelly Wenham seems positively animated, and she's playing a world-weary assassin. The script tells us why we ought to care for K, but we just don't, not even when he plays Good Samaritan to a neighbor-lady pestered by thugs. There's a little nudity, but the dialogue is as stultifying as the plot and the kung-fu girls get no decent action. The 2010 TEKKEN was at least mindless fun, but REVENGE is merely mindless.