Hand on heart, then I am not a fan of movies based on fighting games, but this one topples all the rest. It pretty much sums up the definition of bad movies.
"The King of Fighters" suffers horribly from an very weak and basically non-existent storyline. And whatever little was there just didn't work. Come on, putting in an ear piece and then press a button and you go to an alternate dimension to fight? Yeah, that was perhaps the most epic fail of the entire movie.
Also, the movie suffered from a lack of acting talents. Surely there were some scenes that were alright, but in general the acting performances in this movie was painful to behold. And also the actors/actresses didn't really have much of a solid dialogue script to work with. And also the characters portrayed in the movie never grasped you, they were shallow and had no personalities, so it was hard to relate to any of them or get any kind of emotion for any of them.
Now, what did work for the movie, was the CGI effects. They were actually adequate enough to look at. I especially liked the regular flame and blue flame effects, they looked cool.
Some of the fighting scenes were good enough to look at, and had just the right amount of speed and action. But most of them actually were strenuous to the eyes and came off as half-hearted, forced attempts of making a fight scene.
I wonder what made Maggie Q agree to participate in a movie like this. Usually her movies are somewhat further up the ladder compared to this movie. If for no other reason, at least her appearance is a treat for the eyes.
There are way too many movie versions of fighting games out there, and 99% of them doesn't translate well to a movie screen. And "The King of Fighters" is one of them. I actually fell asleep and was out for 20 minutes during this movie, it was just that boring. I am sure that the director had the best of intentions at heart, but there is no need to make a movie out of a fighting game that has long gone out of date.
If you are into action movies and movies based on fighting games, "The King of Fighters" should be avoided, you are better off watching something like "Mortal Kombat" instead. This movie is not really worth the effort.
I wasted an hour and a half on this (well more like an hour, as I was out for 20 minutes or so), and this is definitely not a movie that I will be returning to ever again.
