Double Dragon (1994)

You have to take this movie for what it is, a mid 90's video game era and Ninja obsessed culture movie. Many people rate this movie bad because they are up tight adults. In reality, this movie is great for kids who like martial arts, etc.. It's a good movie for kids who want to watch Martial Arts style movies but without all the bad language and sex. Somehow that gets bad ratings from the morons of today.The futuristic imaginary city, "good gangs", and villain aspects are so good. Cheeky one liners and cars with flames. My sons loved it. It's very much a power ranger and TMNT feel. It's so 90's and this movie had great casting.

Yes, during the 1990's is when the whole let's make video games into movies phase begun. I do believe "Super Mario Brothers" was the first, while "Mortal Kombat" was probably the most successful of the 90's. "Tomb Raider" and "Resident Evil" would have rather good success in the 2000's. This one is not a success, I mean Mario was not a huge success either, but it did manage to have a lot of hype to it and was a known movie, while this one kind of flew under the radar. However, this is not surprising, this one has the look of a movie that was direct to video with the only known actor being Robert Patrick and the only thing he was really noted for at the time was being the bad terminator in the film "Terminator II: Judgement Day". This film manages to take a rather simple plot of two brothers fighting through a bunch of gang members to rescue the girlfriend of one of them to some strange mystic medallion that really overly complicates things and makes for a rather bad movie that is almost unwatchable except for the occasional chuckle as you realize people wasted their time making this stinker. Seems they often make movies out of the video games that have virtually no plot during this time as Mario and Mortal Kombat also had very little substance to them. Yet games that do have some substance such as say "Legend of Zelda" and "Metroid" do not have a movie. Granted you would have to change some things here and there to make them movies and not just a live action video game, but there are good stories in them that I think would translate well to a film.

First off lets talk about what the Double Dragon movie is not. It is NOT a serious movie. It is NOT supposed to be some big deep, thought provoking movie. It is NOT at all a bad movie.Now this movie was obviously made to get fans of the game in the theater regardless of whether or not it was good. However I think people dismissed it after the first few scenes which I feel is unjust. The movie itself does not really follow the story of the game....which is good because the plot of the game was pretty thin (not that this one is complex or anything....but it works). The movie is however what it should be....a buddy action/COMEDY. Thats right people you read that right I said comedy. And no this isn't one of those so-bad-it's-funny movies....the movie actually attempts to be funny and in my opinion....succeeds. Now some of the action is just awesome.....yet other scenes remind you that the studio just wanted a movie as quick as possible. Some scenes get a bit to....how do I say this....Home Alone....or 3 ninjas-type. In other words, when there could easily be a martial arts battle (and given the fact that this is double dragon people expect it) sometimes they just do things like knock over a barrel of balls for the bad guys to trip on three stooges style. Sometimes it can be somewhat funny but for the most part it isn't really needed. The acting for the most part isn't bad....I mean you got Mark "needs to be more appreciated" Dacoscos, Scott "I was on some dumb show but now I can kick a bit of ass" Wolf and Robert "I was the T-1000 bitch" Patrick. All 3 leads know how to act and do a good job with what they are given. Now lets talk about the script/story. It is corny, Cheezy, and at times dumb....but it really works for the movie. It really feels like a comic book on screen or even...(gasp) a video game! Overall, double Dragon suffers the same fate the super Mario Bros movie did....in making it a comedy and a bit different from the game people responded with hate....unjust hate....let me put it to you this way...If you changed the names of the characters so that they are not directly from Double Dragon....and people saw it without thinking about the game...it would be much better received. The IMDb score would be at LEAST a 5.4, and that is something I am sure of.Scoring: Acting:7.8 Action:8 Story:8 Script:7 Overall:7.5 Summary: Double Dragon joins many video game movies that are universally hated for not being a direct carbon copy of the game. However it is a fun, enjoyable adventure/comedy that will most likely entertain kids and adults who want to have a fun 90 minutes. I recommend it as long as you are not a jackass.

My first acquaintance with the Double Dragon feature film was through a collection of video captures hosted on the X-Entertainment web site. Even they could not prepare me for the purely abysmal experience that the film proper represents. Like so many video game films after it, Double Dragon takes a perfectly good idea for a video game and turns it into an abysmal feature film. The film itself has a few things in common with the video game: the title and a few character names. The game featured one or two players moving a character from the left of the screen to the right, punching and kicking seven bells out of anyone who dared to get in their way. Unfortunately, Greenleaf Productions and director James Yukich thought that by aiming the film at children too young to remember any of the video games, they might make some money. Fortunately, the adults who were old enough to have played the classic video games ignored the film as it deserved. We certainly would not want the powers that be in Hollywood getting the idea that we actually like this kind of crap, after all.The first problem lies in the screen writing. What made the video games so compelling was that they made as little effort as possible to differentiate its setting from the reality of the player. The story, such as it was, was secondary to people beating each other senseless. In the feature film, the writers attempt to give the story of Double Dragon a background, a motivation, or a reality. They manage to get all three, that much is true, but they all come out the same way: incredibly silly. Making matters worse is some incredibly stupid costume design. I do not know who designed Alyssa Milano's attire for this flick, but I am just betting they spent much of the time when they first saw what they had made laughing at poor Alyssa. Whomever designed the makeup effects for the Abobo character should have been arrested for crimes against the viewer. I do not know exactly what they were trying to achieve with all the lumpage on his body, but whatever it is, they failed. Perhaps his best scene is when Milano is force-feeding him spinach in one of the weirdest interrogations on film.Also looking to fire their agent is Robert Patrick, who was at the time struggling to capitalise on his burst of fame after Terminator 2. Perhaps his agent told him that films based upon video games were going to be the new big thing. What the agent forgot to mention was that while they were a new big thing, they were a new big thing in unintentional comedy. Preceded by one year with Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon set a new low in cinematic history that it took another five years to worsen in the form of Wing Commander. I have no doubt in my mind at all that when Patrick looks back at this film, he thinks to himself "this is the moment I took what was still a salvageable career, and flushed it down the can". His performance is utterly terrible here, so I am inclined to blame the level of pathetic that Double Dragon reaches upon the director. After all, he has shown already that he is more than capable of turning in a good performance with halfway decent direction. Not that a good performance from either would have saved this cinematic abortion.Another problem for a film based upon a beat-em-up video game is that the fight scenes are terribly executed. The camera rarely sits still long enough to make out what is going on, the choreography is utterly terrible, and the actors chosen for the parts clearly have no idea what they are doing. Was it really that difficult to get some people who really know their martial arts for the task? Hell, let's farm the rights out to Golden Harvest, they at least know how to choreograph a halfway decent fight scene. Especially poor are the scenes with Abobo, where none of the superhuman strength the film goes to great pains to tell us he has is actually utilised. Much like Michael Beck in Xanadu, he is really there as window dressing. Part of the problem here is that the canonical character Abobo is meant to appear superhuman in size, and the film just goes too far in trying to maintain that illusion. It would be better to have left the character out of the story altogether than present us with the tumour-encrusted visage we get here.Even as an unintentional comedy, Double Dragon is a failure. Sure, there are moments when the viewer is either going to laugh or cry, the moment when Marian force-feeds Abobo spinach being a prime candidate. However, these moments are too infrequent, and the film takes itself far too seriously otherwise, for this to be anything other than a mean-spirited laugh at the principal actors. Half of the dialogue sounds like it was ADRed by prepubescent children, and none of the actors save Robert Patrick look like they could punch their way out of a bag of potato chips. I can still remember when the advertising corps. made a big deal about this being a film based on a video game, back in the days before films based on video games had a reputation for being universally terrible. And I still wonder what the hell Alyssa Milano's costume designer was smoking. In at least half of the shots she is in, she looks like she is contemplating force-feeding spinach to her agent until he vomits up a lung.For these reasons, I gave Double Dragon a one out of ten. Between watching this film again and being given a spinach enema, I would choose the spinach. You must be wicked hardcore if you can sit through this.