Super Mario Bros. features Dennis Hopper playing a dinosaur-descended humanoid dictator chasing a rocket shoes-aided Bob Hoskins across a fungal-covered cyberpunk dystopia—all while Luigi is depicted as the cool one. Street Fighter sees Raul Julia feasting on the scenery while Jean-Claude Van Damme flexes an American flag tattooed across his Brussels muscles. Mortal Kombat dares to ask, “What if Enter the Dragon had a techno house music soundtrack and a four-armed monster being punched square in the scrotum?” Double Dragon includes a scene in which Alyssa Milano force feeds a mutated thug spinach before locking him in a dingy bathroom.
If you are lucky enough to find the time to watch any of those movies today, you’ll likely come away from them saying, “It’s incredible that this thing exists.” It’s impossible to imagine anything like these movies being made in the 2020s, especially if we’re talking about adaptations of established properties primarily targeted at younger viewers. They’re horny, violent, bizarre, and often made by people who didn’t even have to pretend to be fans of these IPs during press tours because nobody had any expectations that they would be.
And for that alone, they are often delightful. They are, at the very least, a cathartic antithesis to what such adaptations have become. As our own Joe George pointed out, A Minecraft Movie is often at its most endearing when it’s at least trying to do something unusual, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing. By comparison, those ‘90s live-action video game movies are 90+ minute testaments to the raw entertainment value of seeing what you can get away with when you’re playing with house money.
They’re filled with veteran actors turning in delightfully villainous performances, genuine attempts to push ‘90s special effects beyond their reasonable limits, and in the case of Double Dragon, an explosion so massive that it reportedly prompted emergency calls from nearby residents. It’s often difficult to tell what these movies’ creators were going for, but you can’t watch these movies and present a good-faith argument that they weren’t going for it all the same.
Even the common argument that these movies weren’t true to their source material often feels reductive in retrospect. We’re talking about movies based on eight and 16-bit worlds that weren’t exactly blessed with the rich narrative and deep lore we come to expect from many modern games. The directors and writers of these films conceivably labored under the delusion that they were being true to what little material their sources offered. Putting Bob-ombs and Bullet Bills in Super Mario Bros. or sneaking the Double Dragon arcade machine into Double Dragon the movie was as genuine an attempt at pandering as what we see in A Minecraft Movie.
To be fair, you also shouldn’t try to paint these movies with the same broad brush in terms of their accuracy. Street Fighter may have jettisoned the whole global fighting tournament concept, but it did its best to fill the movie with familiar faces, much to the detriment of its plot and pacing. Mortal Kombat remained the gold standard for accuracy in a game adaptation for quite some time. That’s largely because of its director’s increased familiarity with a franchise that had actual lore and worldbuilding to work with. It struck a balance between staying accurate and expanding a thin game concept into a full-length film that arguably never really became the standard for such adaptations.
