I’ve never quite understood the appeal of the videogame film. Are we supposed to feel proud that our precious hobby has hit the big time, that it’s now so real and important that the grown-ups finally have to sit up and take notice? The idea of stripping out the best part of a game (the interaction) and padding the dull bits out to two hours crippled by budget, focus groups and amateur directors with no idea what made the games good is hardly an appealing one.

DOA in this sense is incredibly lucky. Directed by the once-respected Corey Yuen and co-produced by Paul W S Anderson of AvP/RE infamy, it’s tacky, inane, self-parodying and wilfully stupid, but while this is a considerable drawback to more pompous titles, here it means it retains the exact same spirit as the games that spawned it, games that have always aspired to be flashy Hollywood trash.

To accurately recreate the very essence of the DOA experience, I went to see this film by myself. And sat at the back of the theatre. By myself. In total there were twelve people in the cinema, three pairs - two mixed gender and one pair of males. There was also one group of three lads and two other singletons aside from myself, both doubtless also taking notes and then scurrying back home to pen an ironic review for some pointless website or other. Good, awkward company for what promised to be an hour and a half of awkward guilty pleasure.

DOA the movie begins in a grab-bag oriental palace. The designs, costumes and weapons say Chinese but the talk of ninja and shinobi are distinctly Japanese. But who cares, because there’s about to be a fight! (This maxim recurs roughly once every three minutes for the duration of the film.) Princess Kasumi wants to find her brother Hayate, missing since a year ago when he left to fight at the last DOA tournament. If she leaves the ninja clan she’ll be a runaway, a shinobi, disowned and hunted down - but she doesn’t care because she lubs him. Leaving the palace, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the BURAI ZENIN stage, she immediately encounters a fuckload of soldiers, intent on stopping her. Walking through them, she’s stopped in her tracks by AYANE, played by half-Malaysian, not-at-all-Japanese Natassia Malthe. She wants to kill her. Grr!

Kasumi parries, thrusts and then breaks for the main gate, hopping up onto a recently-thrown embedded sword and then leaps from the parapet, sprouting Batman style (purple) canvas wings from her costume and gliding off into the clouds. This is the film’s only true walkout moment. If you can get through that then you’re primed for a further hour and a half of juicy, glossy and quite ridiculous face kicking.

As she’s flying she’s tossed a shuriken-like device, inviting her to the MOTHER FUCKING DOA FIGHTING TOURNAMENT. Oh god the film has character introductions that flash up, displaying their name and fighting style/profession, launching us gloriously into the realm of ultra-camp, the way it should be.

When dealing with game-to-film conversions it’s important to get the look and the feel as right as possible. Story I find comes a distant seventeenth, just after ‘voice is squeaky enough’ and ‘monsters have same amount of back acne.’ Much of the film is generic - the music is ‘pulse-pounding techno’ (whatever that means) with the occasional Rent-A-Soaring Chorus, the locales jump from Chinese historic drama to hi-tech lab to luxury hotel suite as and when events suit them, but the events themselves, and the actresses tasked with the incredible undertaking of bringing the DOA Girls™ to life aren’t bad at all.

Christie is introduced in the shower (yesss) and then fighting off (’beating off’ would have been so inappropriate) some secret agents while simultaneously getting dressed. Fans of Australian soaps and dismal pop careers will recognise Holly Valance, who looks great in scant underwear and abandons her attempt at an English accent twenty minutes in, although not before Christie has said ‘arse’, which is fantastic. She’s a lot less slutty and evil in the film, one of those nice assassin/thieves, who only kills or steals from horrible people who deserve it.

Tina (Jaime Pressley) shows up next, soaking up some sun on her private yacht, before being attacked by and thoroughly kicking the backsides of a bunch of Chinese pirates, led hilariously/tragically by Robin Shou, who played Liu Kang in the Mortal Kombat films. Tina is hard to go wrong with really - the good-natured cowgirl wrestler with daddy issues - Pressley is immensely likeable with great comic timing; mugging and drop-kicking her way through the role and looking great in swimwear. And the way she says ‘Hayabusa’ is just lovely.

Kasumi’s is a more difficult character to represent - real people don’t simper and blubber the way she always does in the games and there’s the issue of her ridiculous age/figure. While Devon Aoki does well with the defiant, noble and slightly sad aspect, there’s little of the girlish indomitable spirit, nor the lush physical goddess the games take such pain in rendering.

A big issue of a live-action DOA was the transition between the game’s infamously inflated females and real women with real body shapes. The marked difference between the two came as a shock to me, as I’m sure it was to many of you and while a lot of the time the difference is acceptable, sometimes it just slaps you hard in the face. Kasumi has literally NO TITS. Not even one! That’s like making a film about what a great painter and cook Hitler was. And while women with DOA-esque physiques do exist in the real world, they’d clearly much rather eke out a career of having fat human hedgehogs dribble spunk onto their chins in front of a film crew. Fine.

The only one who really goes totally wrong is Helena - instead of the tragic, caged songbird opera star she’s a wacky rich girl - the contestants first run into her as she’s rollerblading around DOA Island wearing skin-tight purple hotpants!

Still I’m willing to forgive such sins, as Sarah Carter is by far the most attractive member of the cast - genuinely, warmly good-looking, as opposed to the others, who without their skimpy outfits and airbrush/makeup overkill would be fairly unremarkable-looking.

The male characters deserve a mention too, wrestler Kevin Nash makes for a decently redneck Bass Armstrong, handling his rocky relationship with Tina with deft good humour (the running joke about him thinking she’s a lesbian is great.) Zack gets a fair bit of screen time too, presumably entirely because

a) comedy black man
b) his main personality trait is wanting to fuck Tina. (Ah my favourite two words, right there.)

Leon and Bayman fill the role of generic gurning hired muscle working for bad guy Donovan, and while Hayabusa is hardly the legendarily cool super ninja of Ninja Gaiden, he beats the crap out of several hundred foot soldiers and acquits himself fairly well in the moody angst stakes.

As for fans of the other cast members - look away now.

Leifang doesn’t say a single word, and appears only fighting on monitors (monitors with life meters at the top) and in two-second montage clips before losing early on. Gen-Fu, Jann Lee and Brad Wong only appear in background shots, their homemade costumes clear evidence that much of the budget was spent on laser pube removal techniques.

Hitomi DOES NOT APPEAR AT ALL IN THIS FILM. Her name does, as the monitor-displayed ladder rankings fly about, but the actual character is entirely missing. The same goes for Elliot - a name check and a possible scream, but nothing else.

Lisa is similarly entirely absent, not even mentioned once.

PROTIP

Reviews of this film that mention ‘teenage boys playing with their joysticks’ are referring to young males stimulating their genitals until ejaculation.

DOA the movie perhaps wisely eschews the mystical bollocks that the increasingly silly Raidou/Tengu/Genra brought to the games - it’s a spy/heist/martial arts film grounded (mostly) in reality, with more of a western slant to it. The bad guy here is Victor Donovan, evil capitalist/scientist and clearly quite sexually frustrated host of the tournament.

His ultimate plan? EVIL SUNGLASSES. That is to say, sunglasses with the complete nanotechnologically-recorded fighting data of everyone who took part in the DOA tournament downloaded onto them, which allow the wearer to view a suspiciously realistic VR simulation of any fight before it happens so whoever has them on can therefore predict, and thus counter any attack made. These strangely unthreatening weapons (presumably the wearer will still die if shot with bullets) are to be sold to six internet paedophiles on a big world map monitor. Fortunately his plan is foiled just in time, the day is saved, and the film even finds time for a bit of misunderstanding of how PCs and the internet work (here’s hoping the next version of Windows comes with a ‘CIA ALERTED’ message, perfect for those thorny DRM issues.)

At this point it’s traditional to complain about the how the story deviates cruelly from that of the games. Fortunately nobody knows what the DOA story actually is, which sidesteps that issue nicely. Still plot is a minor inconvenience at best - especially when the fighting is frequent, bone-crunchingly loud and over-the-top, zinging along nicely with everyone practising generic Hollywoodised, CG-augmented, Matrix-flavoured kung-fu, save for a bit of swordplay and an armlock and a half in the brief Tina vs Bass fight. Combat is entirely bloodless and bruiseless and even the numerous sword kills don’t draw a drop of red stuff.

Being set in a fighting tournament means as well as the brief scraps and faceless henchman culls there are also title fights - the ‘rules’ of the film stating that a fight can happen anywhere at any time, as soon as their Special DOA Watches (merchandising possibility!) say so.

The best fight has to be Christie vs Helena on the beach in the rain - it’s moody and dramatic, and the recent scientific discovery that female clothing becomes transparent when wet is put to marvellous use. It’s a shame that none of their history or rivalry was used, as that would have elevated it a little further into the as-yet unexplored region called ‘meaning’.

Kasumi vs Ayane in the compulsory bamboo forest is snazzy - Ayane only exists in this film to fight/hate Kasumi, Tina vs Zack in the ‘Forbidden Palace’ and Kasumi vs Leon in er her bedroom are equally spectacular if facile, well-directed, but with no sense of danger, it’s all glossy surface with about as much depth as Helena’s shorts.

The film climaxes with a precarious, spectacular 3 vs 1 ladder fight that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Once Upon a Time in China (or Xena: Warrior Princess) and follows up with the mandatory self-destruct countdown.

In-between fights there are huge great dollops of sass, silly comedy and Kasumi, Tina, Helena and Christie even find time to have a relaxing game of beach volleyball. Issues get resolved, the bad guy dies, the nerd gets the girl, the thieves learn the error of their ways and everyone sails off happily into the sunset.

DOA the movie is great. And by great I mean shit, but shit in all the right ways - it’s shameless, un-self-conscious and cheekily exploitative, with comic book dialogue and a scene where you can almost see Zack’s cock.

You’ll have forgotten it an hour after seeing it (the film, not the cock) but it’s great fun for the duration. I saw a review that called it an FHM photo shoot turned violent and that’s really the perfect description. In fact I wish I’d stolen it. Most importantly of all, it ‘gets’ the games in all the right places, and is, broadly speaking, exactly how a fighting game film should be. While travesties like Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter The Movie and the Boll Dynasty completely misunderstood their source materials, DOA doesn’t, and people complaining about the film being tacky and stupid really need to go back and play the games again.

And while perhaps there’s still a definitive DOA film waiting to be made in Team Ninja’s CGI dungeon, one that’s expansive and thoroughly Japanese, until then I for one am quite content, perhaps you could say even satisfied with this effort.