Double Dragon (1994)

I had written a longer, more comprehensive review of this film, and before I was able to publish, Blogger decided to not only stop working, but to lose its autosave of my progress. This film is not worth reviewing in full form again, but I am very disappointed that my thoughts on video game adaptations in the '90s are lost forever in the annals of the internet.

Long story short, Hollywood did not know how to go about adapting video games because they were seen as toys for children, yet had fairly violent and large-scale notions and ideas. That's how you get a Street Fighter movie where no one fights in the streets, a Mortal Kombat movie without any blood-dripping fatalities, and a Double Dragon movie where Billy and Jimmy Lee are being pursued by evil, rather than taking it out one punk at a time. They have a ghetto-looking car that they control with a video game controller. Their main physical threat is a disgusting pig man who looks like a Max Headroom reject. They wear color-coded hoodies and sweats until the last 5 minutes of the movie. They are backed up by a gang of rebellious street punks led by Alyssa Milano. And they are played by Mark Dacascos and, direct from Party of Five, Scott Wolf. Needless to say the movie's a bomb; even Robert Patrick's scenery gnashing as the villain does nothing to kickstart the movie into something watchable. The action is almost nonexistent, and the martial arts that ARE on display are absolute crap, on par with a bad Power Rangers episode (a shame, given I've seen Dacascos kick some serious ass on film).

Skip it. For context, this PG-13 flick made a little less than 2.5 mil in the U.S. box office. Less than R-rated flicks like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Bloodrayne (made by a German genius named Uwe Boll). Hmm.

P.S. Andy Dick, George Hamilton, and Vanna White play news anchors in the film. Just in case there were some of you still ready to hunt this down like I did.