The King of Fighters

If you are a Kof player, do not watch this.

If you are into action/fighting movie, do not watch this.

If you love watching good movie, Do Not Watch This.

I really have no idea why they made such a movie?

Was Dragonball no bad enough?? Have they no learn the mistake??

What is the director or the screen writer thinking?? Iori Yagami looks like a playboy?? Kyo is American Spanish?? (can't really tell what nationality he is, but he sure is not the Kyo we are expecting), maggie Q as Mai? And who is that guy using the 2 sticks? Rugal?? not Mr.Big??? No to mention the other characters, i am really speechless.

This is not X-Men, or Spider Man, or one of those American superhero story, which was successfully turned into movie.

This Is Kof. You simply just can not find a bunch of people, film some really bad fighting scenes, slap a movie together and call it Kof.

Sorry about the complain, but I had to hold my anger for 1 and half hour, just so i can see it to the end, and be sure how hopeless this movie is before i made this post.

I wanted to give this a 0 star rating, but the lowest is 1 so yeah.

It's bad.

The King of Fighters is based from a video game of the same name. As far as adaptations go, this film is a lousy one. It is mediocre, lame & cheesy. Except for the CGI who gave this film a little bit of oomph, the other aspects fall flat.

Fans of the game would be very disappointed with this film, as they have expected more than this. The casting is poor, Ms. Maggie Q included. The acting was unbelievable, and lacks any impression.

I expected more from this film, and it is very disappointed to have to watch this mediocre film for the hour and a half I spent which was a waste of time.

There are some movies that if you are fan of what is about to be told in that movie, you can say "errr.. It's a bad movie i know but what can i do? i love this cartoon/anime/video game etc."

i have been playing KoF games more than 11 years but i have never imagined that a movie about this game would be so painful to me. It was total agony. All the characters obviously have been killed by the script writers. Cast is dead. There is a soundtrack in the movie but believe me, if the movie would be a movie without soundtrack no one would argue that.

Everything was 'so' awful in this movie that i couldn't believe this movie took rating more than 2.

Total mediocre. Pain. Agony. Disaster. Catastrophic.

0/10

Please don't waste your time watching this movie!! Its horrific to see how low budget movie production houses and poor unprofessional directors try to make a movie from a franchise and twist the original characters and story and fan support into a pathetic show of a movie which is nothing but a complete joke.

I mean I was speechless once I was able to finish this movie after keeping myself in the chair in hope that the director would come up with something better. But Alas, it was the same joke again n again.

You could tell at every step of the movie that its a low budget movie with directions so horrible that the actors are stiff, dialogues not in place, the tiny bit of special effects being forwarded to make it faster. Like for gods sake, you couldn't make the Orochi ball into a little bit better display??? If you can't make a good movie, then please don't screw up the original story board and the KOF name.

Anyone with the slightest taste in movies should stay a million miles away from this movie. The whole production house and director should be ashamed of what they have done. Me, a proud fan of KOF, disgusted beyond saying to see this movie.

If there's one video game that I suck at big time, it will be The King of Fighters. Already I was struggling back then with mastering all the Street Fighter character moves, then this game came along, where one has to master 3 characters as a group and face them off either with some artificial intelligence (now programmed to be smarter at your neighbourhood video game store), or with another human challenger who finds it easy to cream me with one character in full energy left to spare.

Things have been relatively low key for the film version of the video game, and perhaps rightly so since it's not automatic that films from Japanese video games, manga and animation make that dignified live-action leap onto the silver screen, most falling short in the process – last year's disastrous Dragon Ball Evolution and the lacklustre Street Fighter Legend of Chun Li being very recent examples of the bad aftertaste left at the box office. Audience these days demand a lot more, and the in-built fan base no longer representing a ready market, but a base of high expectations that are difficult to meet even as they are aware some tweaks to characters and story lines are necessary for the change of medium. This Gordon Chan directed effort however, is expected to fall short given the extremely flimsy, cookie cutter storyline that reeks, and for an action film, the cardinal sin of having limited action, almost all of which are left to the last 30 minutes.

Maggie Q marquees this film as Mai Shianui, working undercover for Terry Bogard (David Leitch) of the CIA (I hear yawns already) to hook up with Iori Yagami (Will Yun Lee) who teaches her the background myth of having a necklace and a mirror combined to open a door to another dimension. There's a sword in the picture as well belonging to the Kusanagi clan, but one rumored to be lost, and required by chief villain Rugal Bernstein (Ray Park) in order to reign supreme in the King of Fighters MMORPG since he's stolen the other two items and tweaked the system so that his rules apply in the virtual world and is working to combine all dimensions and realms into one. That's basically it, with the heroes trying to convince the Kusanagi clan heir Kyo (Sean Faris who plays a half-Japanese, that explains his Caucasian looks) to cough out the legendary sword, and stop Rugal from destroying civilization.

What's neat is how Rita Augustine and Matthew Ryan Fischer managed to fuse the fantastical elements of the fights that nods at the Matrix experience, with combatants jacked in through bluetooth-like earpieces in order to fight in the virtual MMORPG dimension complete with superhuman powers from the game, though the fights during the first hour had just a very little glimpse of what the finale would promise. The King of Fighters then is a tournament where combatants rise in the ranks through each victory, though with the compromise now by Rugal, death in the dimension also means death in the real world.

What didn't work, happens to be a lot of things. For starters, we have the usual cardboard characters (OK, so this is based on a video game) with CIA agents, hokey Japanese philosophy talk, and just about every situation, setting and background of the characters being extremely contrived. As mentioned the first hour of the film is talk, talk and more talk on the usual genre themes like responsibility and destiny, Then you have heroes who are reluctant and blur, and how one gets transformed from zero to hero is absolutely baffling based on pep talks from memory. The quest for the Kusunagi sword also happens in the most roundabout fashion just to bloat the film's runtime, and amongst all the characters, Terry Bogard happens to be the most carelessly designed on screen with that out of place jacket and baseball cap (keeping to the game I know), with a really obnoxious, ignorant attitude, and a CIA dimwit a-hole to boot.

The fight sequences happened to be a mixed bag, though Hong Kong influences are very heavy in the way the fisticuffs are designed. Special effects inspired by the game are also limited, which is most unfortunate as the game is famed for the various combo-moves that the characters can execute, which is all but lost in the film version. Even then, whatever effects all seemed to be reserved for the extended battle sequence at the finale for an all-out duke out, and audiences will have to be patient with all the talk for the first hour before things start to get remotely interesting since all the money shots get concentrated toward the end.

Naturally movies of this nature will have an ending primed for sequels to continue where it left off especially when the box office response is positive, but my money's on the "Nay" list. If I have to compare, then this is ahead of Dragonball and The Legend of Chun Li, but only just.