TEKKEN 2: KAZUYA'S REVENGE

KONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

If you were to go back to 2010 and make a list of all the year's movies that were likely to get a sequel, then Tekken would not, let's be honest, be in the top three quarters of that list. You can understand doing sequels to Kick-Ass, The Expendables or Insidious, but the idea of further instalments of Tekken is like the idea of further instalments of I Spit On Your Grave or Hot Tub Time Machine: who the hell is asking for them? Who even bothered to see the first Tekken movie (apart from me, obviously)?

Nevertheless, they've gone and made Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge anyway: they've ditched the whole martial arts tournament structure and instead gone for the amnesiac assassin routine, with ludicrous results. A man (Kane Kosugi) wakes up in a hotel: he doesn't know who or where he is but when a battalion of heavily armed badasses show up he suddenly discovers that he's very good at fighting. Captured, he's named K and forcibly recruited into the assassin ranks of The Minister (Rade Serbedzija), a cult leader with a small army of colourful killers at his command, taking out the bad guys in the slums around Tekken City. K rises through the ranks but when he discovers that The Minister is actually the biggest bad guy and he's been using K to wipe out his enemies, he goes rogue and tries to track down his past....

The biggest con in Tekken 2 is that it's only the lead-up to an as-yet unmade Tekken 3 in which our hero presumably gets to take on the supreme villain behind everything: his own father and ruler of Tekken City (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who's barely in the movie till the last ten minutes or so). Since he suddenly has the power of teleportation this might make things a bit tricky. Tekken 2 isn't any good at all; the dialogue and story are terrible and the one visually striking henchperson (dressed as a schoolgirl for no adequately explored reason) is disposed of disappointingly quickly. It looks decent enough and the fighting is suitably crunchy with lots of kicks to the head and snapped limbs, but it's still rubbish. Directed by Wych Kaosayananda under his equally spellchecker-unfriendly alias of Wych Kaos.

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