One million weekends ago, before I was a teenager, before the word tween existed, I had a problem to solve. There was a saying, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your friend’s parents.” These parents paid attention to sugar content, video game violence, prohibited “The Simpsons”, and had eagle eye focus on movie ratings. Before Netflix, the casual weekend sleepover consisted of a trip to pick up some pizza and make a stop at the Blockbuster. Over the years, I had curated a list of films that would make it past the prying eyes of helicopter parents. Now, if you have seen Double Dragon, you might be thinking that this movie is tame and lacks substance, but there was nothing like seeing Power Ranger style fight scenes, the man behind the Terminator 2’s T1000, massive explosions, Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, and finally Alysa Millano in a crazy getup that made her look absolutely thicc. But alas, this film was PG-13! Luckily, it could be found in the children’s section, which was just enough lubrication to pass right through the parental units security system. And now, watching this with a critical eye as an adult, it really went above and beyond to give you a top notch fantasy that most other films in this line never imagined. It is with mad respect that I say, Double Dragon is a bomb ass kids film.

This movie is nothing like the video game. The story of the original game was very simple. You are brothers, Billy aka Bimmy and Jimmy Lee. Billy’s girlfriend Marion is kidnapped by the Black Warriors, a street gang. The brothers Lee fight through Neo New York to get her back. The movie is bonkers by comparison. What it lacks in preservation, it makes up for with sheer imagination. The premise of the film is completely rooted in this neo Los Angeles (New Angeles in the film) that mirrors a quirkier version of Blade Runner’s LA. The film lives and breathes in all these little details that are totally clunky and you might even say unnecessary, but this film is a soup, one little thing missing and it might not make a huge difference, but together they make an umami broth. The deepest aspect of this stew is the constant earthquakes that plague New Angeles and which also presumably sank Hollywood to the point that they have boat tours of old institutions like the top of Mann’s Chinese Theater, left cresting just above the water. Everywhere they go there are these building stabilizers that need to be pumped to keep the roof over their head, which may or may not be real science. All of the cars rely on fuel made up of garbage that you can grab right off the refuse filled streets. These details can be easily overlooked and undervalued, but it creates a great deal of the flavor for the film. They make up for the flimsy plot and the child-directed acting. They surround the meat of a normal film and make it into something you can really chew on.

As for the construction and delivery, we might have on our hands here a film that has the most kid movie tropes in a single film. Ever. I tried to write a list, but it seemed endless, and all of them are used on the fly while moving the story forward. For instance:

• Infiltrating the bad guys office through the AC trope
• Trying to steal something off the bad guys desk from above through the AC grate trope
• Falling through the ceiling when caught trope
• Turbine fan sucking people in trope

And that’s just the progression of a single scene. People slip on gumballs in the middle of a fight for god’s sake! Tropes propagate in every corner of the film. You could even make a drinking game out of one. The brothers do this celebratory handshake where they make a fist with one hand and an open palm with the other and punch into each other. Every time the brothers Lee do their childish handshake, take a shot. You will be way more drunk in the back half, by then it gets pretty intense. I wish I could accurately describe the saturation of kids entertainment nonsense that propels this movie, but suffice it to say, it has it all.

This certainly wasn’t the most compelling children’s film of the time, Disney was right in the middle of its animated renaissance and was consistently acclaimed. Live action, low budget kids films were a dime a dozen as well, and most of them were pretty awful. But when it comes down to it, Double Dragon has a consistent, cohesive vision glued together by a living, breathing, cheesy world. It’s all in the little details. Like replacing payphones with oxygen stations and having two businessmen fight over it. And like all kids films, they leave the kids feeling empowered. The police are too scared to go out at night to fight the gangs, so a group of teens and tweens called “The Power Corps” decide to take back the streets. Now, what this actually looks like is a little unclear, but they do try to teach kids that corporations are generally the root of all evil, revealing that the corporations own the gangs and pay them to keep people scared. That too is a 90’s kids trope. It was always street gangs and corporate big wigs.

The action and setpieces are campy, or maybe you would just call it corny, and they could have been a little better in some places, but most of the time they are satisfying. This film famously set a Cleveland river on fire and created a giant explosion that had actual citizens calling emergency services. The costumes were the envy of young tweens yearning to hang out at a locker between classes for the first time. You would never find those threads in the store, but you had this feeling that there was some secret store in the mall that only kids 13 and up could find. If you pay attention to all the extras, you will notice absolutely zero consistency in their clothing choices. Sometimes the bad guys are dressed both like clowns and librarians in the same scene. On the other hand, the cool kids in the film have an amazing secret base that the adults don’t have access to, it’s truly like bringing to life the feeling of playing at the McDonalds playplace. Double Dragon delivers a feeling more than anything. Maybe it is a feeling kids today can’t even imbibe, their world seems so different, but I think even without the context of the game, this would still make a good late night movie at any sleepover.

Finally, on the fan service front, because there is so little preservation, you aren’t going to find very much unless you are hardcore fan. Alyssa Milano’s character is named Marion, the name of Billy’s kidnapped girlfriend in the game. At one point, the gang runs into the Double Dragon arcade cabinet. Abobo makes a very strange appearance in a grotesque getup that you will wish you could forget. If there was much more than this, I really couldn’t put my finger on it. Everything else is probably too small or trivial.

When it comes to making a video game film, this leaned much more heavily on the originality side than preservation, but it had a sturdy construction and delivery that more than makes up for its lack of fan service. Looking through the list of other live action Hollywood films, it’s looking like it will be the last film to balance with this formula, even though this is only the second film in this series. I think the single minded focus on being a fun kids film outweighs its need to mimic the game, which was honestly fine for me then and now. They could have made a rated R version of this that took the whole thing seriously, and that might have fared better, but it’s really hard to say. Sci-Fi adult action films of the time were very hit or miss. Back then, video games were for kids, despite their stories and presentation being mature, so this was probably the only way to get the film off the ground. I won’t claim that Double Dragon is the best kids action film of its day, but it definitely has more kids action film in it than any other kids action film. If you weigh the film against something like Titanic, it’s going to sink, but put it in the ring punching at its own weight, it’s going to be a contender. Two fist pumps way up.