OnScreen Review: "Mortal Kombat"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
A video game phenomenon began back in the 90s in the form of Mortal Kombat, a fighting game that made its name by cranking up the gore and violence of its action compared to games like Street Fighter or Tekken. People, particular male teens, went gaga over it, and it has been a video game franchise for nearly thirty years now. Its raging popularity spawned two movies in the mid-to-late 90s, one below average and one truly awful. Warner Bros, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to revive and reboot the franchise with Mortal Kombat, releasing in theaters and on HBO Max.
As a video game player, MK is not exactly my cup of tea, but I am not going to begrudge others when it comes to the types of games they prefer to play (I am mostly sports). But video game movie adaptations have a very brutal track record, with very few quality examples to recommend them. Mortal Kombat has the unenviable task of trying to create a movie based on a video game that essentially has little to no story to it. Arcade-style fighter games are basically one player fighting another or playing against a CPU opponent; there is little in the way of plot.
Here, the plot revolves around a pending Mortal Kombat tournament between Earth Realm and Outworld, where Outworld has won 9 straight tournaments, and if they win a 10th, Earth will fall under its dominion. Through various mean, Earth’s champions are brought together to train. All of them, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Sonya Blade (Jessica NcNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), and Jax (Mehcad Brooks), have a birthmark in the form of a dragon. They hope to unleash an inner power through training under Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and his other Earth champions, Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Kung Lao (Max Huang). They must face down the forces of Shang Tsung (Chin Han), led by the lethal Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim). As the lead character, Cole is a former/struggling MMA fighter who has blood ties back to an ancient warrior, Hanzo Hasashi, who witnesses his clan and family be wiped out by Sub-Zero.
Frankly, the less said about the storyline, the characters, and the acting, the better. It is a paper-thin plot with paper-thin characters. I stumbled across a David Fincher quote about his notorious reputation for demanding multiple takes from his actors. He said that he hates earnestness, and usually by the 17th take, the earnestness is gone from the acting performance. While I am not expecting Fincher level entertainment and quality from a Mortal Kombat movie, let’s just say that there were several scenes where I thought to myself, “They definitely did not do multiple takes there.”
But the plot and the characters and even the acting are not the reason anyone is seeing a Mortal Kombat movie; they are seeing it for the fighting, the fatalities, and the flawless victories. On this front, the film is most rewarding, but also a bit of a mixed bag. The 1995 movie was a PG-13 movie based on a R-rated game in order to appeal to a wider audience. The 2021 version of the movie does not make that mistake, leaning into the blood and gore, though not to an extreme degree. You will see hearts ripped out, characters, ripped in half, and body parts dismembered. A few of them were even creative enough to elicit a reaction out of me and a nod of approval. And of course there is the obligatory fan service of throwing in some popular lines and nods to the game, as well as a hint of more popular characters in future installments.
The problem that Mortal Kombat finds itself in, in my eyes, is that the only things that recommend it are exactly the things that make the video games appealing. And if that is the case, then why be a passive observer of the movie when you can be an active player in the game with zero drop off? So, if you like watching other people play a video game, I guess Mortal Kombat is going to be a huge hit for you. If not, I don’t know that there is much more to recommend this movie beyond a few solid quips from Kano and a few eyebrow raising fatalities.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
(Mortal Kombat is streaming on HBO Max through May 23rd.)