The King of Fighters

 

What it's about:

A number of fighters are occasionally summoned to compete in a combat tournament in another dimension, travelling there via a mystical earpiece. But an evil force known as the Orochi also lurks in the other dimension, and it has the power to possess and corrupt anyone who touches it. Moreover, the Orochi and a vengeful fighter named Rugal intend to collapse the two dimensions into one, effectively destroying life as we know it.

What we thought:

The tradition of films based on video games being utterly crap-tastic continues with an emphatically horrific entry from Gordon Chan. At least this one has a mostly hot-ish Asian-looking cast in it, though everyone has Hollywood accents, so it's a rather moot point anyway.

Also, what's with combat movies and women? While the guys get to wear hockey masks, fur coats and leather jackets, the women have to settle for corsets, catsuits and impossibly short minidress-and- suspender combos. Even Chun-Li had tights, dammit.

Look, far be it from a guy to complain about Maggie Q and Francoise Yip (Canadian!) showing a bit of leg, but some realism would go a long way in a movie like this. Speaking of which (spoiler alert!), there are only two instances of blood in the movie – when Francois Yip gets semi-filleted near the start of the film (she survives), and right at the end, when suddenly everybody's showing the signs of about 75 minutes of non-stop ass-kicking. In between? Nothing. Not a bruise. Not even on the faux-lesbian couple who started the movie in towels.

Ray Park (Darth Maul) gets a few lines this time – he's more typecast than Andy Serkis, but we're not sure if he's Australian or from Sheffield. That's about the sum of novelty interest in the dialogue, which loses any semblance of coherence about thirty minutes in.

In the end, the film is little more than a number of combat set pieces set to unconvincing grunting and moaning and connected by even worse exposition. It's like porn with fighting, come to think of it. Except there's no funky guitar music.

And perhaps the terminally angled, off-balance photography is meant to distract you from the awful script and storyline. It doesn't. But it does prove that there are worse video game adaptations than those made by Uwe Boll.