Starring: Maggie Q, Sean Farris, Will Yun Lee, Ray Park, Françoise Yip, David
Leitch, Bernice Liu
Director: Gordon Chan
Action
Director: David Leitch
I guess I should start this review by stating that I’ve never been a big King of Fighters fan. I have nothing against the franchise, mind you. After all, my brother and I had the original Fatal Fury game for the Genesis and spent hours and hours playing that. Moreover, I spent many a good quarter on Fatal Fury 2 while it was in the arcade, usually playing Mai Shiranui for obvious reasons (I admit that her character wasn’t the best fighter in the game, but I don’t care). I also rented the Fatal Fury motion picture twice and had Fatal Fury 2 on VHS as well. So I’m not completely removed from the SNK universe. I simply had stopped paying attention to their games when they decided to consolidate their franchises into King of Fighters.
Despite my general apathy for the game, I was rather excited when I found out that someone got it in their heads to make a movie out of this. I was doubly excited when I found out that Gordon Chan was going to direct it. After all, the man did Fist of Legend, one of the greatest martial arts films of all time. I was even more excited than that when it was revealed that the main character was going to be Mai Shiranui. That excitement continued to build with the reveal that Ray Park would play the villain and that Françoise Yip would have a role in the movie, too. It felt too good to be true.
But it didn’t take long before the excitement began to deflate. First was when I looked it up on the IMDB and saw that Gordon Chan wasn’t going to use a Hong Kong choreographer to work on the fight scenes. C’mon Chan, even if this is a low budget effort, you could at least get Lam Moon-Wah to be the action director. Lord knows that man needs at least one more decent film on his résumé so that he won’t have to spend the rest of his career saying, “Well, I worked on The Club, so nyah!”
Then I found out that Mai Shiranui was going to be played by Maggie Q. I’m pretty neutral toward Miss Q. I don’t know what the deal is with her stage name, but I have nothing against her. She looks a little different from the average Chinese actress her age; I wonder if it’s because she hasn’t gone through eye-opening surgery or something. She can hold herself well in a fight, at least on camera. However, she doesn’t strike me as being my first choice for Mai Shiranui. I mean, the obvious reasons involve bust size, but I won’t get into that. She just lacks Mai’s bubbly personality. It also didn’t help that early promotional pix showed that Maggie Q wouldn’t be wearing anything remotely resembling Mai’s trademark outfit…or be wielding fans…or being anything remotely resembling Mai Shiranui.
So my interest waned. I still wanted to watch the film, but I had low expectations for it. Then the internet reviews began popping up. Dismal. Dismal. Dismal. I mean, I would’ve accepted a Dragonball: Evolution level of ineptness. That movie is so wonderfully terrible that you can’t help but laugh your head off while watching it. Unfortunately, King of Fighters didn’t even give me that. It just a bad film with mediocre-to-decent fight scenes.
I don’t really feel like doing the event-by-event summary of the plot, so I’ll just try to explain it all in a nutshell. In real-life Japanese mythology, there are three royal treasures that get mention: a jewel, a mirror, and a sword known as the Cloud Cluster Sword. That last one shows in the story of Susano-O, a god who slays a dragon named Orochi. While cutting Orochi to pieces, Susano-O’s sword strikes the dragon’s tail and breaks. Susano-O discovers that there’s a super-powerful sword in the creature’s tail, the Cloud Cluster Sword. This story is referenced in the films The Three Treasures and Yamato Takeru, just in case you’re all curious.
Those same treasures figure into King of Fighters, but not in a way that you’d expect. You see, the three treasures are able to channel some fount of mystical energy and open a portal to a parallel dimension. It happens to be the same dimension that Orochi—who’ll be depicted throughout the film as a floating bundle of CGI snakes—was banished to millennia before. The treasures belong to three Japanese clans, who use them to hold martial arts tournaments in the aforementioned parallel dimension. Why? How the hell should I know? I didn’t write this film.
In recent years, the female head of one of the clans, Chizuru (Françoise Yip, who’ll be wasted just as much in this movie as she is in everything else she’s appeared in) figured out a way to use a Bluetooth earpiece to channel the aforementioned mystical energies so as to not need the treasures to open the portal. Yeah, I’m still trying to figure out what drugs the writers were on to come up with that.
Enter Mai Shiranui (The Warrior and the Wolf’s Maggie Q), who’s no longer a hot kunoichi, but a mildly-attractive CIA agent. She’s been assigned by her boss, bumbling CIA agent Terry Bogard (David Leitch), to investigate the tournament. The motives are a bit murky, but I think it has something to do with using the tournament—which Terry doesn’t even know exists—in order to get to mass murderer Rugal (Darth Maul himself, Ray Park). Mai’s investigation has made her the current girlfriend of Iori Yagami (Elektra’s Will Yun Lee), a retired contest participant. The two are attending an exhibition of two of Japan’s Three Treasures when Rugal shows up, wearing a polka dot scarf. He blows the brains out of one of the guards and gets in a sword fight with Chizuru, giving her a nice slash and guaranteeing that Françoise Yip won’t do anything more of not for the rest of the movie, since Françoise Yip can’t have good things. He also steals the jewel and mirror and takes off into the other dimension.
So what does Rugal do in the other dimension? First he allies himself with Orochi in order to become more powerful. He then tricks two of the tournament’s female participants, lesbian lovers Vice (Bad Blood’s Bernice Liu) and Mature (Monique Ganderton, who’s been a stuntwoman on films like Resident Evil: Apocalypse and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale), into coming into the dimension (a plot point was made earlier that a bed-ridden Chizuru had warned the participants against going into the dimension). After terrorizing the girls while dressed up as a hockey player in one of the film’s most embarrassing moments, he kisses Mature, transforming her from a lesbian into his willing slave. He then forces Vice to go back into the real world and let the other fighters know that there’s no harm in going back into the dimension. When Vice returns to the fight dimension, Rugal ties her to a chair and kisses her, too. She ends up suffering the same fate as Mature.
Meanwhile, Maggie Q is heading up to WashingtonState, which looks like Vancouver, where the movie was filmed, in order to find Saisyu Kusanagi. Saisyu is now in a vegetative state after an altercation with Iori years earlier. Caring for him is his half-breed son, Kyo (Sean Farris of Never Back Down). Kyo claims to have no idea what Mai is talking about when she confronts him to talk about the tournament, but he’s really just hiding. Saisyu kicks the bucket soon after Iori appears to him and Iori and Mai have to convince Kyo to join them. Both Kyo and Iori try to defeat Rugal by themselves and get soundly thrashed for their efforts. While all this is going on, the bodies of the tournament participants are piling up and Bogard is putting more pressure on Mai. All this goes on for about a little more than an hour, after which Chizuru, Mai, Terry, Kyo, and Iori travel to the parallel dimension to have a final showdown with Rugal and his two lesbian S&M-fantasy, kung fu-kicking molls.
I’m not sure if I need to write anymore than the aforementioned plot description. I mean, isn’t that enough to tell you whether you want to watch the film or not? I mean, it has Terry Bogard as a bumbling CIA agent! What the hell? How do you go from Ryu-esque martial arts drifter to that? It has Rugal dressing up as a hockey player! Kyo Kusanagi is played by a white guy! Mystical energies that can open portals can be tapped into via Bluetooth? What sort of crack were the writers smoking when they wrote this? All of a sudden a mult-ethnic UN raid by Colonel Guile Van Damme on M. Bison’s SE Asian stronghold is looking like a good alternative. Speaking of Van Damme, I really miss the days when Hong Kong filmmakers had to make a Van Damme film as a Rite of Passage into Western filmmaking. This movie really could’ve used a bit of Van Damme to spruce it up a bit. Maybe he and Dolph Lundgren could’ve played the Ikari Warriors. But I doubt they could’ve helped the film’s script, which contains the sort of stilted dialogue associated with action-fantasy cartoons from the 1980s and early 1990s, the kind that only William H. Macy could make work.
So tell me, filmmakers, if you’re willing to set up the plot point in which the characters’ clothes change whenever they go into the other dimension, why do you have the suit-wearing Terry Bogard switch into something a little more like his video game counterpart, but have Mai go from normal clothing to something a modest prostitute would wear, as opposed to her colorful, revealing “ninja” outfit? Oh, and why even go through all the trouble to put a story into the movie if it’s going to be as retarded as it is? Did you not learn anything from Enter the Dragon; Bloodsport; and Mortal Kombat? When doing a tournament film, it’s best to keep the plots and characters thin and the action thick and fast. That’s how we fans of crap cinema like our martial arts films.
Ah yes, the action. David Leitch was responsible for the fighting here, although we can’t blame him for the film being rather poky. That’s more Gordon Chan’s fault. Leitch has caught A LOT of flack from fanboys about the fighting in this movie, although I’m not one of them. Trust me, I’m a fight choreography junky. I suspect that going into the movie knowing that the fights were arranged by a Caucasian who isn’t J.J. Perry helped me to lower my standards enough so that I didn’t feel the need to curse Leitch every time a punch was thrown. I mean, the action is pretty forgettable when you get right down to it. It never was frustrating, though. The camera moves around a little too much, but I could see what the actors were doing 95% of the time. It’s funny when martial arts that’s on the level of an early 1970s Han Ying film gets a pass simply because it’s visible. There are some optical effects used to accentuate the power of the blows, plus Rugal uses a flaming legs technique. It’s all silly, but I didn’t find it offensive to the eyes. The quality of the choreography is somewhere between “1980s Chuck Norris” and Lam Moon-Wah’s work on Avenging Quartet. There are some decent exchanges of punches and kicks, and the action never reaches Pat Johnson levels of blandness or JCVD levels of punching bag stiffness. It certainly was better than what Dion Lam and tens of millions of dollars were able to get out of Kristin Kreuk in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.
People hoping for Ray Park’s next Darth Maul
performance will be disappointed here. Park spends more time trying to be a
wisecracking villain than he does wowing his with his wushu skills.
Maggie Q holds her own, but then again, she has a solid Hong Kong movie
background to draw from. Everybody else is solid, if unremarkable. The cast
deserves better material to work with than this. That goes doubly for Françoise
Yip, who gets wasted on a level that’s only marginally less bad than in Romeo
Must Die. The first fight between Mai Shiranui and Mr. Big is arguably the
best one in the film…at least it’s the one I can actually remember.
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