On the ‘videogame movies are awful’ scale, what are you expecting? Based on the beat-‘em-up series, King Of Fighters is very much in the latter part of that spectrum. It starts badly but not terribly, but then very quickly plummets thanks to a story that pretzels itself into oblivion and an acting performance (among many rubbish ones) so bad that it seems like it must’ve been a dare.
For the first half-hour or so, the set-up is simple enough: combatants compete for the King Of Fighters title in battles that take place in alternate dimensions. These people are transported to the parallel universes via Bluetooth headsets, making the movie look like a budget flick. Still, then you don’t go into this expecting Avatar-esque production values. So it all seems set for a fight film full of decent if not spectacular choreographed sequences, with some women in skimpy outfits thrown in as service for the target demographic.
But then comes the critical plot point, relating to three sacred artifacts and a demon potentially being released from this Nokia-sponsored netherworld. Funnily enough, this is also the moment at which the whole thing loses.
You may know him as Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace or Toad from the X-Men movie, and there’s a perfect reason why those roles were somewhat light on dialogue. Playing villain Rugal, who steals the artifacts mentioned above, he takes a dramatic hammer to proceedings, and it’s all downhill from there. It may seem harsh singling out one man amidst a fairly dire cast, and it is, but then this film dispenses with sense, so why shouldn’t I? It may not be as offensive as an Uwe Boll movie, but it isn’t any better.