We walked out of Mortal Kombat II and my friends asked me why I didn’t like it: “It was just like the game!”, “You expect too much, it’s just Mortal Kombat.”
And that’s my issue exactly.
I’m not asking for Citizen Kane. But we deserve more than a movie that’s exactly like the video game… at least I can play the video game. So please enlighten me: what is the point of doing a LIVE-ACTION Mortal Kombat if it’s going to look just like the video game anyway? From the AI-slop feel of the fights and the early 2000s CGI in the fatalities, to the sets that look faker than a Spirit Halloween backdrop, was there a single real location in this $80 million movie? Where did the money go? Because it sure wasn’t toward the cast of sauce-less nobodies. (I’m sorry Karl Urban. I’m sorry Baraka.)
The fights are so weightless you’ll get more thrills watching a two-hour YouTube fight compilation. Where is the raw brutality? You’re Mortal fuckin’ Kombat, the franchise so violent that parents wrote letters to Congress, forcing the U.S. government to invent the ESRB… the most dangerous thing about this film is its runtime. Your movie has an R-rating, is it too much to ask for a level of violence that actually uses it? Break some bones. Make me wince. Make me squirm. I want to feel something real, dammit.
The biggest crime in this sequel might just be that the fights carry ZERO personal stakes beyond “THE FATE OF EARTH REALM”… listen up Hollywood, we no longer care about Earth, it’s kind of like a boy who cried wolf situation, we’ve seen the planet getting almost destroyed way too many times, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. You’d think the tournament structure would generate some dramatic tension, but no, characters are teleporting from one fight to the next with zero banter, zero rivalry, and zero reason for us to care who wins. The personal is what makes the spectacle land. Without it, you just have noise.
The story can’t decide whether to anchor itself around Johnny Cage or Kitana, tries to do both, commits to neither, and therefore nobody gets anything close to an arc. The villains aren’t much better. Shao Kahn had genuine juice in the opening: menacing, physical, a little psychotic. Then you watch him fight and almost die three separate times throughout the film. By the final showdown I couldn’t care less about him. You cannot do that to your big bad… and the tragedy is that Shao Kahn is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: Mortal Kombat has some of gaming’s most genuinely interesting lore and deranged mythologies and this movie has no idea what to do with any of it.
Realms colliding. Gods with political agendas. Sorcerers manipulating history across centuries. Characters who are half-dragon or the reincarnated souls of murdered monks. There is so much to work with here. This franchise can go full camp, full grimdark, full video game absurdism, full grounded martial arts… all of those versions could work. Instead we get this cheap and vanilla rated-R MCU tone that commits to nothing and hits me like a horse tranquilizer.
Do I care too much? Absolutely. But we deserve better.
Ultimately, this is the worst type of sequel… so focused on fixing what “fans” disliked about the first film that it never stops to ask whether any of those fixes make for a better movie. Yes, we wanted a tournament. Yes, we wanted Johnny Cage. But fan service is not a substitute for craft. It’s the bare minimum. Is it too much to also ask for character arcs, convincing visual effects, and a story that holds together for two hours?
The martial art genre can make for some of the best “video game” movies, I’m looking at you Bloodsport, John Wick 3, and The Raid, this shouldn’t be so difficult!
Sigh… at least Street Fighter looks good.
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