Double Dragon (1994)

I wasn't expecting the next Citizen Kane of this movie, but I was expecting a little more than I got. Double Dragon, the game, is about two of the baddest martial artists the gaming world has ever seen, but the Lee brothers in the movie are a pair of goofballs who don't kick any significant butt until like the last fifteen minutes of the movie. They actually spend most of the movie running away from the bad guys. There are one or two recognizable video game bad guys like Abobo and the lady with the whip, but other than them this movie has almost nothing to do with the game. As far as adaptations of Double Dragon I'd say this rates a little below the cartoon show in quality. You can have some dumb fun by watching this movie, but dumb's the operative word...

Fmovies: Here's the thing, I'm an avid video gamer, and I'd be hard-pressed to find a Double Dragon game I didn't play. As a fan of the games I was very much looking forward to the movie.

Sadly I was very disappointed from scene one. It had nothing to do with the games, and even the horrible animated series was better than this crap.

Sure, they have the main characters from the game, Jimmy and Billy Lee, but they only had one character played by a real martial artist played poorly by Mark Dascascos of the ill-fated Crow TV series.

Basically the movie takes place in an apocalyptic wasteland which was Los Angeles and does pretty much everything it can to bring down any kind of honor the game itself maintained.

I vote it as possibly THE WORST VIDEO GAME MOVIE EVER....aside from Mortal Kombat: Annhilation. If you see this movie, run.

1 out of 10.

Mark Dacascos and Scott Wolf star as Jimmy and Billy Lee, two brothers who join forces to keep a magic medallion out of the hands of a gang leader (Robert Patrick in an embarrassing performance) he already has the half of it and he'll do anything to get the other half. People often times wonder why Robert Patrick and Mark Dacascos never got that far in their careers. Well for those that are curious, here is your reason. Double Dragon is easily one of the worst video game adaptions and from what I remember about the video game, this isn't one that is all that hard to adapt. Indeed had this been done as an Indianna Jones style thriller with numerous martial arts fights, we might have had something. What the movie ends up being is a cheeseball adaption that fails to engage anyone over the age of 11. Although i'm not sure even if small children will enjoy something so stupid. It's a bad movie. Just plain bad.

* out of 4-(Bad)

Double Dragon fmovies. 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 di

This was another lousy attempt at a movie based off a video game. I loved the Double Dragon video games since I was a kid, but I was ashamed of myself for watching this movie. The story line is basic, good guys trying to beat up bad guys. The film is very goofy and geared towards the younger crowd but fails with the PG-13 rating. If you want effects you will not find them and if you want a good movie don't watch this one.

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.