BrickNash I'm going to start by saying that there has only ever been one great video game to move adaptation and that was the terrific Mortal Kombat and that should give you an idea of what direction I'm going in with this review.I'm not your average movie goer, I am first and for-most a retro gamer and in the 80's and 90's I lived and breathed computer and video games with Double Dragon being one of my all time favourite games. It's now 2014 and for 20 years I have avoided seeing this film. I deliberately dodged it when it came out because I just knew in my heart of hearts that not only would it have nothing to do with the game but it would be watered down kids action with bad acting all round.Well guess what, I was right!Double Dragon: the Movie is atrocious!!! Seriously, it really is that bad. Now I'm a big fan of low budget post apocalyptic action films from the 90's but even then Double Dragon takes the biscuit for just sheer lack of quality on all counts.The film features I think THE worst acting I think I have ever seen. the delivery of the cringe worthy lines is so bad it makes King Of The Kickboxers look like an Oscar winner, but then those kind of films are backed up with a quaint charm and great fight scenes, Double Dragon has absolutely none of that whatsoever and is a magnificent turd from start to finish.I'm convinced that video game adaptations were simply cash makers given to first time or music video directors to dip their toe in the film world because the name would generate at least a bit of revenue and it really didn't matter whether the actual film was good or not.As for the game well, it had a pretty thin story I'll admit, but there was no reason why they couldn't have taken that thin story and built on it instead of making up this mystical nonsense and almost completely changing everything which just p*****d off fans of the game who should have been the films main target instead of the simpering under 10 year old's that it was aimed at.I will be fair, there are one or two positive points in the film but they are extremely trivial. One is the matte paintings used for wide shots of the earthquake ravaged city, they are quite nice and add a bit of atmosphere. Two is Mark Dacascos, he is a fine martial artist and a decent actor but even he struggles in this film. Third and finally is Robert Patrick who genuinely looks like he's having some fun. When he accepted this role Mr Patrick was either desperate for work or he is the absolute King and master of not giving a f**k and I suspect it is the latter because he seems to take a lot of glee in hamming it up and ham it up he does, but with a bit of a wink.Another small point I'd like to make in the interest of fairness is that if you were young and saw this film when it came out then I can totally understand the nostalgia value attached to it and how that can make any film seem so much more enjoyable but being such a huge fan of the game I was never going to have that even if I saw it in 1994 so this review is completely objective.That's about it! I don't think I've ever given any film a 1 before but Double Dragon truly deserves it. A great, steaming pile of utter s**t that bears practically zero resemblance to the great game on which it is based and is an absolutely terrible example of film making in itself.

slshusker OMG this movie stinks. I only ended up watching it because the SLEUTH channel said Miami Vice was playing now. Instead, this epic is on. After 10 minutes, I thought this was some straight to video movie. Then I realized this was a really bad 90's movie. The cast completely under performs. It has to be the director's fault. The producer threw money in the toilet. No way they made their money back on this bomb. This movie should never have been made. I wonder what the budget was.Robert Patrick...bad guy/former evil Terminator - hair is worth watching the movieMark Dacascos...plays a good guy, like in all his B-movies Scott Wolf ...total wimp, couldn't beat up Jello, plays martial arts dude with a hot temper. He is Ryan Secrest's twin. Alyssa Milano...cute young vixen, I don't care if she can act.If this movie is based on the video game, I didn't notice, because of the lame plot, silly acting and again, Wolf acting tough.Throw in the occasional hottie, bad girl and this is a fun watch, if you ignore that acting. Go in with the belief that the movie is better than watching bass fishing and you'll at least have something to tell your friends about later. "Dudes, I saw this terrible movie."There has to be a way to turn this movie into a drinking game, like taking a drink every time a lame line is said. You'll kill a case of beer in 20 minutes.

mentalcritic 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.

die_buffy_die Double Dragon is better then Super Mario Brothers. Then again, so is everything else. The movie was released in 1994, looks like it was made in 1989, and the fashion is circa 1980. Why is it people from the future dress like they're from the past? And why is it Alyssa Milano looks hefty? It was terrible, unsophisticated and bumpy. That said, it gave me exactly what I wanted. Slapstick Sung-fu action and a few familiar faces. I enjoyed. You don't rent a movie like Double Dragon because you want an engaging plot. You rent it to relive your childhood hi-jinx.Watch it and I guarantee you that you'll be downloading an emulator and playing it within a week.