Video
games are a hard medium to transfer to film. There has never been a a
truly successful video game adaptation. Look at the games that have
been made into movies, look at the style of games, beat-em ups, First
person shooters, platformers...etc, non narrative games that have
struggled to find audiences. While some have had some great
production values, Super Mario Bros being a prime example of some
fantastic practical FX and something like 2005's wasted opportunity,
Doom, these films had at least some redeeming features, then look at
some of the absolute stinkers that have come out, and yes I know SMB
and Doom were both pretty shit, House OF The Dead, Postal, Dungeon
Siege, Bloodrayne, and those are just Uwe Boll movies to Street
Fighter (1995), Legend OF Chun Lee, Tekken, DOA, they've all failed
because the games lack an already decent narrative plot. So Now with
games being more story centirc, could we see better story driven
game-movie adaptations? Possibly, Silent Hill and the first Resident
Evil have come closest to achieving this. But what happens when you
get a game, a popular arcade game of the late 80s and early 90s where
the idea is to walk around punching and kicking people in face and
turn it into a movie?....you get 1994's slightly rubbish Double
Dragon, now I say slightly rubbish because well it is kinda rubbish
but it's also a lot of fun. You see Double Dragon has this weird
style about it, it was clearly filmed on a lower than average budget.
It stars two actors as brothers who are two different ethnicities, ok
I know Wesley Snipes and Woody Hareleson in Money Train are brothers
but they're foster brother so it does count, features a hammy Robert
Patrick dressed as Vanilla Ice and a sort of mix of Demolition Man
and TMNT style future. It's a bit of mess but an organized mess.
Double
Dragon follows two brothers in the post-earthquake U.S where San
Diego and Los Angeles has merged into one city. It follows their
battle against an evil gang leader called Kogo Shuko, who has one
half of an ancient talisman which, together with the other half forms
the double dragon and grants the owner complete power. The other half
belongs to our two main characters, Jimmy and Billy Lee. Shuko will
stop at nothing to get the talisman so the brothers join forces with
the rebel daughter of the chief of police and her punk friends to
take Shuko down.
It's
a pretty generic movie plot and it pads out the 90 minute runtime,
but it's a generally fun movie to watch.
The
film stars Robert Patrick, post T2 and dressed like a cross between
Vanilla Ice and Johnny Depp. He plays the evil Kogo Shuko and hams it
up royally, giving the film a bit more of a fun side, it's like he
watched Die Hard and decided to base some of his performance off Alan
Rickman's Hans Gruber and the rest of his performance off the many
generic villains in films like the 3 Ninja Kids movies or whatever
villainous person showed up in early 90s Martial arts influenced
action films.
Jimmy
and Billy are played by Marc Dacascos and Scott Wolf. Dacascos to my
mind is the single most underrated martial arts actor in Hollywood,
he made some cracking films in the 90s like Only The Strong, Crying
Freeman and the absolutely brilliant Drive. He got rave reviews for
his role as Manny in Christophe Gans dark french fantasy, Brotherhood
Of The Wolf but since then has been making pretty poor movies like I
Am Omega for The Asylum and was woefully underused as the main
villain in The Jet Li action flick, Cradle To The Grave. He could
have been a massive star but I guess his cult status among action
nerds in recognition enough. He's pretty good as Jimmy Lee, a role
that comes across as a mixture of Ted from Bill And Ted and Neo from
The Matrix, basically he's the budget version of Keanu Reeves.
Scott
Wolf on the other hand is fucking terrible, like someone just grabbed
a harvard grad off the street and said “hey kid you wanna be in the
moving pictures, stick with me kid and you'll see your name in
lights...see”, he doesn't fit with role of martial arts kid and
looks more like Mikey from the Goonies. He's bland through-out, to be
fair, with the exception of the recent remake of V, where he played a
slimy TV reporter, i've never seen anything in Wolf, I can't comment
on Party Of 5 because I never watched it. Here he sucks.
Alyssa
Milano, looking more like Denise Welch off of Loose Women than what
Alyssa Milan actually looks like, she was fun, not Jenny from
Commando fun or Sherry Sheridan fun form Dance Til Dawn but, yeah,
she was fun.
It's
not a terrible movie, but it's not a great one either, it's just a
dumb fun movie like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and kids might find
it fun but the more discerning viewer might find it an embarrassment,
not me, I grew up with these kind of films and I enjoyed revisiting
it after about 15 or so years. It definitely has cult written all
over it and of all the video game adaptations, it definitely one of
the better one...hell just watch it for Bo Abobo...you'll know when
you see him...
The
reason for this review is that UK independent label, 101 Films are
releasing it on Blu-ray this month and much like their Toy Soldiers
release which I reviewed a few weeks back, Double Dragon is a bare
bones release, but again, much like the Toy Soldiers release, the
picture quality, the HD transfer, looks amazing. I'd only ever seen
Double Dragon on an old ex-rental VHS so to see it so clear and
smooth with a healthy amount of grain was fantastic. The colours were
vivid, the blacks were black and it just looked great. I'd recommend
picking it up for the image quality alone.
Double
Dragon is released on 25th May 2015 from 101 Films as part
of their “Cult Movie Collection” and the RRP is £12.99 DVD and
£15.99 Blu-ray, but these are the Recommended Retail Prices and
you'd probably find the Blu-ray for about £12.
I'm
giving the film a total of 3/5. Two for the film and a star for the
picture.
First of all, DVD as a medium is non-deteriorating, meaning that the quality is identical every single time it's played, be it today, tomorrow or in 60 years from now. This makes DVD the ultimate storage medium for your precious memories. VHS to DVD transfer
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