Double Dragon - Die 5. Dimension

One of my favourite childhood games gets the typical nineties Hollywood makeover and only just entertains for all the wrong reasons!

Set in the future, well, if our year of 2007 really turned out like this, in the city of New Angeles. With vehicles powered by burning rubbish, police curfews, buildings held up by jacks, and lots of colourful clothes and bad jeans, we enter the god awful world of James Yukich's Double Dragon.

In a nutshell - Embarrassing acting from most cast members, all but Dacascos, Wolf and Nickson, that only adds to the unintentional humour, terrible make-up, costumes and direction. Its only saving grace is its two gorgeous leading men who give us some decent fight scenes and a number of funny enough one liners!

In my opinion - Hollywood, oh Hollywood... For many years you have astounded us with your inability to chose directors that know what they are doing, that suit the project in action, or generally just can't stop ruining great things! Taking a documentary film maker and handing him one of the ultimate and most popular games of that time, should have been the first sign to the studio fat cats that this was going to be as much of a success as the previous years, Super Mario Bros.

Haunted by that typical mid nineties costume department that helped make a lot of then films look naff, there is pretty much nothing in this 90 minutes of madness that stays true to the game. Every extra looks ridiculous and is annoying as hell, with most of it playing out like some bastard child from a Power Rangers episode!

Is there anything good in Double Dragon I hear you ask? Well, yes if I'm honest. Both its leading men are absolutely gorgeous and perfect leading men material for such a film. They probably act the best out of everyone, and Scott manages to hold his own in the fight scenes alongside the always incredible Mark Dacascos. It is only a shame though that Hollywood executives thought this would be the best film to introduce Mark as a leading man, instead of his classic Crying Freeman which went unreleased in the US for many years!

Double Dragon has its moments. It just makes me so angry to see such a great thing wasted, and another case of what could have been if it was in the right hands. In one scene, the spinach feeding scene, the actor in terrible make-up states, 'I'm not acting...'

Never a truer word said.

I really don't see what everyone's problem with this picture is! I believe that if any film bases itself on a computer game, then it stands to reason that is not going to take itself seriously for a split second! I played some of the DOUBLE DRAGON games for Nintendo when I was younger and they were pretty jokey themselves. This little picture has great fights, great action and most importantly of all, a great sense of humour. Robert Patrick camps it up wonderfully as bad guy Koga Shuko. A young Mark Dacascos (DRIVE, THE CROW: STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, CRYING FREEMAN) kicks less butt than usual but is still enjoyable. Alyssa Milano is great as the sardonic revolutionary Marion, and both Dacascos and Scott Wolf as the Lee brothers (Dacascos is 'Home Lee' and Wolf is 'Ug Lee', geddit?) both have a fine line in sarcastic remarks. The car chase near the start with the 'Dragon Wagon' being pursued by Abobo's van is brilliant, especially with the use of computer graphics. Again, a classic example of good, mindless fun!

Ok, it's not an Oscar winner, but few films are. It is a campy flick, but it's not the wanna-poke-your-eyes-out-to-stop-the-pain campy, but rather in the realm of a guilty pleasure.

In agreement with an earlier post, this was not supposed to be a film that took itself seriously. Notably, the action was on par with any other martial arts movie being made, and the script had a bunch of smart-assy humor (which I must admit that I'm a big sucker for). It's meant to be a fun film, and that was the end result.

As far as a video game movie is concerned, it's not the worst ever made...Mario Bros is still the king, with Street Fighter in a close second, and Final Fantasy in third place. So you see, there are worst movies that have been made.

And folks, I'm not ashamed to admit that I have the DVD for this film in my collection.

To all of you moronic people who refuse to leave decent movies alone- Double Dragon was a PG movie. It wasn't meant for the adult viewer in particular. I watched this movie when I was a kid, after it came out on video and I thought it was spectacular. I still think it's a decent movie. If any one of you losers can name a singular movie from 1994 that was directed towards children that was still packed with action that was better than this then you're a freaking bum. I can probably guarantee that most of you butt heads, that's right I called you butt heads, hated any martial arts style movie that ever came out. Bruce Lee's movies were of a worse quality than this movie and I love Bruce Lee's movies. The point is you can't be a narrow-minded nitwit if you're going to watch movies. I can name a handful of movies or more that everyone and their mother absolutely loved, but I and the majority of the people around me thought were boring and pointless, but I never tore down the movie to other people I just told them that I personally didn't enjoy it. But I guess that's lost on Americans, the rest of the world enjoys something and you guys come along and muck it up.

Oh, for crying out loud. This was a fun little movie with lots of good action in it that never takes itself too seriously. For what it was intended to be, it can't possibly rate this low. Was it honestly worse than "Highlander 2", with its big budget and big-name stars? Or "Glen or Glenda", a shining example of deep cinematic ineptitude? I don't think so!