Sooooo, a Tekken movie is coming out soon. I guess the gamer/geek community is supposed to be happy about that?
Director Dwight Little and screenwriter Alan McElroy are bringing the live action adaptation to the screen with a cast including Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Chiaki Kuriyama, Gary Daniels, Cung Le, and Kelly Overton.
Dwight Little has worked on TV shows like Bones, Dollhouse, Prison Break, and Millennium. That's a pretty good pedigree there. McElroy, however, is partly responsible for Wrong Turn, Rapid Fire, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, The Marine, and Spawn. That mixed bag is something of a turn off.
Now for our actors. Cary Tagawa will look familiar to you from a previous video game adaptation, Mortal Kombat. He's playing the Mishima patriarch, Heihachi. I wouldn't expect them to cast a big burly guy to play Heihachi, but still Tagawa is not as young as he used to be.
Chiaki Kuriyama played a mace-wielding schoolgirl in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Her role in Tekken is unspecified, but she looks like she would most likely play the happy-go-lucky Ling Xiaoyu. The rest of the cast from here are virtual unknowns.
Gary Daniels is a buff mofo who has starred in a lot of martial arts flicks and has his plate full in 2010. He plays Brian Fury, and he looks every bit as scary as Tekken's psychopathic cyborg.
Cung Le is also a bona fide martial artist, but not with as big of a film history as Daniels. He takes the role of Marshall Law. Kelly Overton is the most curious casting of the bunch. She is playing Christine Montiero, which is a relatively new character in Tekken's fiction. That gives you a hint as too how much of the Tekken story might be used in this adaptation.
So that is a taste of this year's Tekken. One would hope this is the year video game adaptations are done right.
Labels: adaptation, Fighting-Games, Films, Movie, Tekken
