By Chris Ranta
The year is 2007; pick a month if that matters to you. You are ten years old and just came back from your local video store with the Wayans Brothers’ comedy classic Little Man and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. You put the latter into your backwards-compatible PS3 and hit that start button.
Suddenly, your brother and his friends join you, hog the controllers, and now you’re spending your afternoon watching them play whilst silently lamenting that it should, in fact, be you instead. Fast forward nearly 20 years, and the feeling returns in the movie theatre of all places.
Watching Mortal Kombat II feels exactly the same way. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a walkthrough on YouTube, devoid of any sort of narrative beyond finding the thing to stop the bad guy.
There are some stakes to it that are only explored when it’s convenient in order to make room for things you remember from the games. How riveting. Isn’t it great that this is what big, mainstream movies are now?
It doesn’t help that the characters are all dull and lifeless, with their personality traits and skillsets in Kombat being one and the same. None of these people is remotely compelling or interesting, and any standouts are in large part due to the performances. It’s no small feat that Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph can make even some of that dialogue work!
Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that none of the games has any sort of compelling plot to them whatsoever and the characters have always kind of sucked, but they at least have the added benefit of an interactive experience that makes them a bit more bearable.
This has been an issue that has plagued both of these recent Mortal Kombat movies, especially the one that is deliberately more plot and character-driven. Any and all attempts to create any sort of substance are inherently futile because Mortal Kombat has always been completely devoid of it.
We buy the games so we can virtually beat the everloving crap out of each other, which is a blast when you’re interacting with it, but not so much when you have to sit through it for two strenuous hours.
Considering how unnecessarily stretched out both of these are, it’s no surprise to learn that this was, at least at one point, envisioned as a trilogy: one set pre-tournament, another set during the tournament, and one more set post-tournament. If that is still the case (so far, so good!), flip open the dictionary and notice all three posters sitting snug under the definition of “padded.”
If one were to condense both new Kombat movies (and probably the third when it comes out) down to a single, two-hour movie, I’m almost certain nothing of importance would be lost. Would it be better? Probably not by much, but at least it wouldn’t be so exhausting to sit through!
It’s also quite important to note that if you’re interested in seeing this, you probably couldn’t care less about anything other than the tournament. Especially as the last film ended before it could even begin, most will be (and are) satisfied with good enough fights and fatalities alone. While this should be the easiest layup of the year, it still finds a way to throw an airball on par with Kris Dunn.
They’re fine, I suppose, but they feel so empty and completely lacking in personality, style, or charm. Another deflated victim of the paranoid studio executive IP mindset is that if you get too weird and silly with it, fans will revolt. I guess this means Mortal Kombat: Annihilation isn’t so bad. At least it made me laugh. A lot, actually. I’ll take the dumbest schlock possible any day of the week over dull and cobbled together corporate slop. Literally every single time.
Catch me choosing the live-action Mario movie over the feature-length screensavers from the past few years. Even looking back at the past few years in action, this still rings hollow. Recently, I saw Takashi Miike’s new film, Blazing Fists, and I’m still thinking about how enthralling its fight sequences are. I’m already starting to forget the entire tournament in Mortal Kombat II.
For a lot of people, finally getting to see the tournament “proper” is going to be enough for them, but all I wanted to do was pick up a controller if it meant I could actually have some fun. If I got anything out of this, it was a reminder that Mortal Kombat just doesn’t work as a movie, at least not a faithful adaptation anyway. Something big, wild, practical, goofy as hell, and 90 minutes is easily the best case scenario for an IP like this.
Just look at the cult following around Paul W.S. Anderson’s film. At least that was fun! It’s not fun when it feels like my $8 went towards watching someone’s Twitch stream. But, hey, what do I know? The guy in front of me was having the time of his life.
3/10
Leave a Reply