Mortal Kombat (2021) — Review Thread

Yea I was entertained and I liked Kano a good bit but it really was very weak as it went on. The fighting all got so weak as things progressed so I hope they correct that in the second one.

But I had a pretty good time watching with some friends honestly. They could get it right next time honestly and get us to the tournament. Bring noob saibot into the picture and we are ready to rock, but get me some better fight choreography.

5/10

Kano is the MVP here, but I'm not sure if can forgive them making their best actor die in the opening minutes and barely use him afterwards.

I hope he got a good paycheck.

1godzillafan



Bridgette Wilson, Sandra Hess or Jessica McNamee?

Who did she play on Sliders?

Like some of the guest cast on Sliders is fucking incredible. There's an episode in season two where Jeffery Dean Morgan is a supporting character. Fucking Jeffery Dean Morgan! And he was basically just playing Negan from Walking Dead.

It was bold of the filmmakers to make a movie that was neither as memorable nor interesting as Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

I hope their strategy of making an R-rated Mortal Kombat movie that was fucking boring was worth the effort.

Mortal Kombat(4/24/2021)

There are a lot of people who look back on their childhood and have vivid memories of playing little league baseball or going camping or riding bikes through the suburbs to save alien or whatever else normies do. But some of my most vivid memories involved spending summer days in my basement den trying to finally beat Motaro, the cheap-ass centaur sub-boss from “Mortal Kombat 3” on my Super Nintendo. In fact the number of hours I’ve dedicated to the Mortal Kombat franchise is right up there with James Bond and Universal Horror for me as far as things I became obsessed with as a child. On some level I always knew that Street Fighter was probably the mechanically superior fighting series to Mortal Kombat but the mechanics of actually playing the game had very little to do with it: Street Fighter just never let you rip a dude’s spine out or cut a dude in half with a hat, so it was never going to stand out as much to me. But my interest in the series wasn’t just rooted in bloodlust, like a lot of people I came for the gore but stayed for the lore. It had a large roster of colorful characters each with their own backstories and a lot of the fun of the franchise came from trying to piece together the canon series of events from each game based on the limited info you got from the various intros and ending texts, in fact I might have spent more time looking up stuff about each character online than I ever did playing the actual games.

Was all of this actually worth my time? Well, I’m not sure I can answer that objectively. I certainly wouldn’t tell an adult looking at these story elements that it was actually good and worth their time given that it’s actually a bunch of weird bullshit that probably doesn’t actually cohere outside of my imagination, but I still like it and I don’t think I’m alone because the new games have kind of doubled down on story despite what most people actually know the games for. I don’t actually buy the games anymore because I’m actually terrible at playing fighting games, but every time one comes out I immediately check youtube for montages of the latest fatalities and for the cutscenes so I know what Johnny Cage and Scorpion are up to these days. Anyway, people have seen the potential in this character roster outside of the gaming context for ages, most notably in the 1995 Paul W.S. Anderson film that I certainly enjoyed at the time but which most people view as being “fun trash” at best these day, but there have also been several attempts to bring the series to television and the internet for a while and I will neither confirm nor deny having read a Mortal Kombat tie-in novel at the height of my youthful fandom. And now, while the games are as popular as ever, Hollywood has come knocking again and the result is the new Warner Brothers (theoretically) theatrical release Mortal Kombat.

Unlike the 1995 film, which revolved around the actual Mortal Kombat tournament and is instead set before the critical tenth tournament as fighters start assembling and the forces of Outworld try to kill some of them before it begins. Our point of view protagonist is an original character named Cole Young (Lewis Tan), who is a low level MMA fighter. When Young is attacked by Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) a fellow fighter named Jackson “Jax” Briggs (Mehcad Brooks) and his colleague Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) help him escape and tell him that a birthmark on his chest means he’s destined to fight for Earthrealm in the Mortal Kombat and that Shang Tsung (Chin Han) is sending assassins to kill these champions before the tournament begins. The trio, along with their prisoner Kano (Josh Lawson), eventually regroup and assemble at a temple where they meet the thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kung Lao (Max Huang), and others and need to prepare for further attacks by Shang Tsung’s attack squad.

This is going to be a difficult movie to talk about because it’s a movie that’s clearly made “for the fans” and as a fan I quite enjoyed it but it’s the guiltiest of pleasures and I don’t know that it’s something I can actually defend. At the very least I expect a lot about this plot is going to sound like absolute nonsense to people who haven’t been exposed to this stuff before as the movie does very little to either slowly introduce all the weirdness or bring it down to earth like the 1995 film did. The appeal of the movie is largely in bringing these famous characters to the screen and doing so without making too many concessions to watering them down; if the 1995 film was the equivalent of the 2000 X-Men giving its heroes black leather suits this one is like an MCU adapting their characters’ to the screen complete with outfits that are colorful and not too dissimilar from their comic book origins. For some characters that works better than others. Kano is his usual over the top seedy self and it’s cool seeing Sub-Zero finally unleash his powers in maximally gory ways, but some characters just don’t have the screen time to really be done justice. Liu Kang and Kung Lao are both relatively relegated in the film despite the former basically being the series’ protagonist in the video games and some fan favorites like Mileena and Kabal are basically turned into background henchmen.

Did I mention that this movie was dumb and pandering? Because it totally is. It’s the kind of movie that goes out of its way to stop in the middle of certain fight scenes to deliver catch phrases like “finish him” and it’s willing to ignore certain aspects of logic and consistency in order to make the characters exist in their most iconic forms, namely through a device where characters just sort of magically acquire certain powers at random. It’s dumb, but the fight choreography isn’t half bad. I mean, nothing here is going to make Iko Uwais or Donnie Yen fear for their jobs, but people looking for some decent fight scenes won’t come away disappointed. It was nice to see this film able to unleash the gory mayhem that made the games famous but which was missing from the PG-13 90s movies, but the special effects here are passable at best and its cast is B and C tier and the presence of just one legit celebrity might have elevated the movie a bit. The movie ends with a clear set-up for a sequel which I wouldn’t mind seeing as there is a decent foundation here but as a story unto itself there’s not a ton to write home about. I don’t know, the more I write the movie the more I talk myself out of thinking it was any good at all, but that wouldn’t be true to my actual experience while watching it. As an MK fanboy I did have a lot of fun with it, but I would have grave reservations about recommending it to anyone else.

*** out of Five