Last night, I sat down with a couple friends as we watched the 2010 KOF movie together. I figured that since my last post was on KOF ’95, I would continue with that particular theme.
I’ll spare you any shock or surprise by telling you that this movie sucks. The problem with this movie sucking is that it doesn’t suck in a spectacular way, like a lot of other TV Game movies. Infamous examples like Street Fighter or The House of the Dead had at least some kind of redeeming qualities to them; Street Fighter was funny and Raul Julia was around to chew on the scenery like the world’s largest Termite, while House of the Dead had like 100 Matrix camera sweeps and thought it would be a good idea to cut game footage in-between fight scenes (also, the retroactive knowledge of Uwe Boll knocking Lowtax flat on his ass). The King of Fighters is simply boring. The best, and only, good thing about it is picking apart just how badly the film doesn’t seem to even know what the source material is, let alone not being true to it. So, let’s take a look at how badly the producers fucked this up.
Let’s start with the cast. For anyone who hasn’t played any KOF game, I’ve gone ahead and posted shots of the characters in the movie next to their in-game designs. So who do we got in this movie?
Mai Shiranui
Terry Bogard
Iori Yagami
Rugal Bernstein
And finally, get fucking ready for this: Kyo Kusanagi
That’s right, folks: the studio execs gave the fucking King of Fighters movie the Jake Gyllenhaal treatment.
Now, these are only the credited roles. Eagle-eyed viewers can find many “Easter Eggs” and figure out which other characters this movie fucked up.
Goro Daimon
Chin Gentsai
Joe Higashi
And if you look real carefully in this shot, you can see Leona Heidern
Yeah, right…..there!
Right away, you can tell that there was no care put into this movie at all. They couldn’t even be bothered to put a red wig on Iori’s actor. Or, for that matter, pronounce “Iori” correctly a single time throughout. “Eye-ori” Yagami.
There’s a plot to this movie. I think. Rugal Bernstein wishes to become “The King of Fighters,” and to do this, he needs to steal three ancient artifacts, and somehow transfer them over to virtual reality, where all of the KOF fights take place. Oh yeah, nobody in this movie can fight for real, and instead need to use Magical Bluetooth Headsets to enter the Metaverse and duke it out there. Anyways, by having these ancient artifacts, Rugal will finally be able to make the cliche “if you die in the game, you die for real” a reality. No, I do not know why he needs to do this, other than to be a dick. But it’s fine, because the script doesn’t know why he needs to do this, either. Nothing in this movie is explained; shit simply happens and then the credits roll. In order to stop Rugal and his video game addiction, CIA agents Mai Shiranui and Terry Bogard need to team up. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Mai and Terry are in the CIA. Because, you know, when I think “sexy big titty ninja” and “homeless guy with a tenuous grasp of the English language” I think of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Also, Iori is there because reasons, and Kyo shows up and does White People things.
Now, I’m not expecting a particularly deep plot here. After all, this is a movie based on a series of fighting games where super-powered martial artists call each other “dweebenheimer.” But I am expecting like, basic coherence. The Mortal Kombat movie was all over the place, but at least was all over the place in a way that made sense; everyone’s on an island where fights can break out at any time, and fights do in fact break out at any time and any place. Johnny Cage and Scorpion fighting it out in a random forest with no explanation still worked in that context. The fact that it was a mostly dialogue-free extended fight scene didn’t hurt.
KOF does not have this. It splits its time between nonsensical exposition, virtual fight scene, more exposition, another fight scene, and repeat. The characters all have to enter a VR chat room to fight in a tournament that has been going on for thousands of years. Thousands of years, a time frame that would have predated things like “virtual reality,” “electricity,” and “international relations.” A virtual reality that everyone totally knows about, yet CIA Agent Terry Bogard thinks it’s a non-existent bunch of bull shit. He does not believe that there is a VR world where people fight it out in a never-ending tournament, despite his CIA partner entering it multiple times, with several of his contacts also knowing about it. The long-standing rivalry between Kyo and Iori is not due to a predestined fate that they share, but because Kyo is biracial in this movie, and Iori is discriminatory against those who are only half-Japanese. You would think that maybe the casting decision to turn Kyo Kusanagi into Kyle Kusanagi would be a commentary on a very real issue in Japanese culture, but no, it’s just a quick way to cover their ass. These flashback scenes with Kyo where the whitest thing about him is his Gi proves that:
he literally outgrew being asian
The writing is a fucking mess, full stop. Maybe the only good thing it did was turn Vice and Mature into full-blown lesbians, which would be cool if they had any character beyond getting their asses kicked repeatedly like cartoon henchmen, and the scene where it’s strongly implied that Rugal rapes the both of them. Because, you know, that was the missing ingredient that kept SNK from overtaking the big boys of the arcade scene: sexual assault.
Something you may have noticed in these screenshots I’ve taken is that the movie is shot badly, too. Lots and lots and lots and lots of Dutch Angles. There are so many Dutch Angles that my hands involuntarily typed “How Do I Join Scientology” into Google.
Did I mention that Rugal is now Freddy Krueger in this movie? He has a different outfit in every fight scene, and he makes sure to ham it up with terrible lines. Ray Park sure has come a long way from playing Darth Fucking Maul in Star Wars.
I will give credit to this movie for one thing: the fight scenes themselves are actually pretty good. Turns out having a bulk of your cast played by stunt coordinators can lead to the action being well done. But, because this is the KOF movie, even that gets fucked up. Lots of quick cuts that kill the action, use of shaky-cam that makes things hard to follow, and those Goddamn Dutch Angles. When the actors are given time to breathe and punch each other, it’s pretty darn entertaining, but you have to sit through a lot of bull shit to get to those few moments of quality.
This movie sucks. Don’t watch it. If you laughed at any of my jokes, then you have been entertained better than this movie could do. And if you didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, then you have been entertained better than this movie could do. Go laugh at the Double Dragon movie or something instead.
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