Director(s): James Yukich
Date Released: November 4, 1994
So, what do you get when you take every 80s to early 90s film craze and cram them into a poorly made adaptation of a beat em’ up video game?
You get a film called Double Dragon.
Double Dragon is all style over substance, only its style isn’t good either. As with the Super Mario Bros. film, Double Dragon’s conception was most likely film producers trying to cash in on the rising video game craze. And just like Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon ended up being both a critical and commercial failure. There is, however, a major difference between Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon: the former is a better film than the latter.
Bizarre and messy as it is, Super Mario Bros.’s setting is distinctive from other films of its time. Double Dragon, on the other hand, seeks to imitate as many popular films and clichés of its time. There are nods and references throughout Double Dragon—Mad Max, The Karate Kid, Terminator, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, etc.—yet nothing close to matching any of these films’s high-quality aspects. Whereas Super Mario Bros. has the talented Bob Hoskins to play one of its lead roles, Double Dragon has no such luck—its leads being one of the film’s most insufferable and damaging features.
Double Dragon takes place in a dystopian Los Angeles—now called New Angeles—set in the futuristic year of 2007! Brothers Billy (Scott Wolf) and Jimmy (Mark Dacascos) Lee—who I presume had the same father yet different mothers since they’re clearly different ethnicities—live in the city with their adopted mother Satori (Julia Nickson). There, the brothers are trained by Satori in martial arts, earning money (I believe?) by participating in tournaments. Satori was good friends with the brothers’s father, who had discovered a powerful plot device called the Double Dragon—a medallion that grants the user cool powers like turning into a shadow and possessing people or invincibility. A rich and powerful businessman named Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick) owns one half of the medallion and desires the other that Satori has been safekeeping. Shuko goes after Satori and the brothers to obtain the other half, reunite the pieces, and rule over the city.
NOTE, THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD:
A protagonist often plays a key factor in its story’s overall effectiveness—so when its protagonists are two incredibly obnoxious teenagers, it’s a safe guess the story is starting off up s#!% creek. The Lee brothers are Double Dragon’s worst aspect. If they were eliminated from the film and replaced with a more tolerable lead (which I’ll expand upon below), Double Dragon could have actually been a fairly tolerable ride. Yet with these two bozos at the wheel, the film becomes a facepalming pain to get through.
Where do I even begin with these two? For starters, the brothers are annoying, foolhardy, annoying, hotheaded, melodramatic, annoying, thoughtless, careless and annoying. For a film focused on teamwork the brothers are terrible at it—constantly bickering, ignoring others advice, and fighting alone for good portions of the film (
The film is also inconsistent with the brothers’s personalities. At first, Billy’s the womanizer and Jimmy’s the gentleman, then Jimmy becomes the womanizer and Billy acts as the gentleman, then they both become womanizers and ogle at their friend’s ass…the same day their mother-figure died! While the filmmakers are to blame for a lot of the brothers’s issues, actors Wolf and Dacascos have a part to play as well. The actors have zero chemistry together, making their emotional scenes feel superficial. Wolf, in particular, comes across as overly whiny, while Dacascos fails to give his character any distinct personality. The brothers ultimately come across as bratty, shallow teenagers that I’d rather see beaten up and defeated than victorious.
Their guardian Satori, on the other hand, is a pretty cool character. She’s badass and levelheaded, with an air of swag to her. I love how she just casually walks behind the brothers—hands in her pockets completely chill—as they’re about to battle a large imposing enemy. She even interrupts Shuko’s villainous monologue with an effective jump kick to the chest. Satori should have been the film’s main character (or at least a main character) over the brothers. The only reason she’s not is most likely to follow the video game’s lore…even though the film diverts from about 90% of it already. I guess the filmmakers also noticed their huge mistake in making the mentor so much cooler than the pupils—why else would they kill Satori off in the stupidest way possible. To elaborate, Satori locks herself and Shuko inside a burning building to kill him despite having already seen Shuko use his magical shadow-transforming powers firsthand—making her sacrifice both foolish and frustratingly in vain as it leaves the viewers with only Billy and Jimmy to lead the story.
Shuko isn’t free from the idiot ball either, with the guy suffering from a severe lack of common sense. Both Shuko and his henchmen never use, nor are ever seen with guns despite having the power to find them, the money to buy them, the resolve to use them and how insanely useful they’d be. When using his shadow possessing power on Satori, Shuko could have easily gotten the other medallion half had he played the con game for a few moments longer—or better yet, he could have pointed a gun at her possessed head and blackmailed the brothers to hand it over…you know, if he had brought a gun like an intelligent villain. There’s a scene where Shuko lets the brothers run away despite them being defenseless and close by—opting to, instead, leave and go hire stupid goons to do what he easily could have done there and then (especially if he had a gun).
To give Robert Patrick credit, the actor does make Shuko far more entertaining than the villain could have been (Patrick clearly understood what kind of film he was in). The actor even gets in a couple funny lines near the finale. The first is a completely dejected “ah s#!%” line delivered after the brothers obtain both medallion halves, while the other comes after being defeated and arrested; “If you think I’m bad, wait till you meet my lawyers.” The former line’s humor is, unfortunately, diminished thanks to the brothers using it far less effectively earlier (Double Dragon, in general, loves to do everything in pairs: jokes repeated, double ass shots, double the annoying leads, etc.).
All of Double Dragon’s funny scenes happen during its finale, such as Shuko’s henchmen on the street with Will Hench for Food and Thugs Seek Ruthless Boss signs after their boss’s defeat. Aside from these moments, however, the film is devoid of intentionally funny moments. Unintentionally, there are several moments that crack me up, such as the film’s large, unrealistic, impractical “future” technology. The brothers’s car, for example, has a bulky, trash-powered jet engine attached to the top, yet it ends up matching, if not going slower than an average car's highway speed (at one point they show the speedometer barely over 70 from "flooring it").
Double Dragon has “90s” written all over it—from the cheesy one-liners and then-dated slang words (“gnarly!”), to now-dated references about Madonna and Jerry Brown (who is vice president in its 2007 reality), to changing the video game’s damsel in distress Marian (Alyssa Milano) into a badass punk vigilante. In exchange for Marian’s progressiveness, however, the film throws in a couple gratuitous ass shots—the first being considerably mild while the second is a blatant, bent over, booty shorts zoom in complete with the brothers gaping lecherously (hey, they had to have something for the viewers to remember).
Double Dragon’s production value is just plain shoddy. One of Shuko's henchmen Bo Abodo (Nils Allen Stewart) is clearly wearing a bald cap for his mohawk and tattoos. The film’s scenery is bland and unimaginative, the chase sequences are slow and dull, and the fight scenes are lackluster and riddled with “slapstick” gag weapons from mops to basketballs to freaking gumballs! By the halfway point—notably, after Satori dies—the film becomes tedious to watch as its focuses on artificial drama and monotonous action. Yes, there’s some cheesy enjoyment to find here and the characters around the brothers can be enjoyable in a hammy sort of way, but the film’s faults far outweigh its positive aspects. With Satori in the lead, Double Dragon could have possibly worked as a goofy, yet mildly entertaining popcorn flick. Yet where it stands, Double Dragon ends up being a waste of time, a waste of effort, and a waste of a potentially far more effective protagonist.
