In the 1987 video game, the gamer plays as Billy or Jimmy Lee, who
fights through the streets to save their mutual love interest, Marian. In the
1994 film, Billy Lee (Scott Wolf, Party of Five) and Jimmy Lee (Mark
Dacascos, John Wick 3) are two wise crackin’ martial arts students who
live in the near distant future where an earthquake has turned Los Angeles into
a crumbling wasteland. The police are on call only during the day while the
gangs run amok at night. A white gang
overlord who calls himself Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2) has
stolen one half of the titular Double Dragon medallion and now has the ability
to turn into a shadow and possess innocents. The Lee brothers and their mentor
Satori (Julia Nickson) are in possession of the other half of the medallion.
Koga Shuko sends the many colorful gangs of “New Angeles” after our
heroes. On the flipside, there is a gang
of teenaged good-doers lead by Marian (Alyssa Milano, Charmed) who call
themselves the Power Core. They make it their mission to pick up the police
department’s slack. The Lees team up with Marion
to take down Koga Shuko and steal his half of the Double Dragon pendant.
The almost literal elephant in the room is the oversized muscular baddy Abobo
who is also featured in the video games. In the movie, he gets mutated into an
even more oversized and muscular thing whose head looks like a sack of
potatoes. He looks extremely ridiculous and develops body image issues and
flatulence.
The filmmakers tried to make an action/fantasy/martial arts/post-apocalyptic
movie to appeal to everyone. History
would show that it didn’t appeal to anybody. Nobody saw it due to
limited releasing and critics hating it. Rightfully so, it’s a pretty bad
movie. But the kind of bad
movie you watch in its entirety and then invite your friends over to watch it
again the next day. You won’t care about the plot as much as you just
like looking at regular Cleveland doubling as a
destroyed Los Angeles.
You’ll be distracted from the phoned-in acting by a seven-foot-tall undead
mutant wearing a basketball jersey. The lack of actual martial arts will go
unnoticed when you see Robert Patrick turn into two samurai sword-wielding
goblins. It’s pure culty goodness/badness.
The print they used for the movie is very nice for those who like that kind of
aesthetic. The special features on this release feature interviews with the
screenwriters who explain why a small studio (Imperial Pictures) had to make a
Double Dragon movie as quickly as they could before they lost the rights. Scott
Wolf and Mark Dacascos are interviewed and are mostly embarrassed by their
performance—and not so much the movie. And for the die-hards, there is a pilot
for the extremely terrible Double Dragon animated show. –Rick V. (MVD,
mvdb2b.com)
