The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
I grew up playing Mortal Kombat games (the early ones, 1-4) and it’s hard to explain to younger audiences just how badass Mortal Kombat was in the 90s. There were plenty of fighting games before it, sure, and Street Fighter 2 was objectively the better game. But Mortal Kombat was just so goddamn cool. There was gore! In a fucking videogame! And the game actually encouraged you to kill your opponent! That may not seem like much now, but it was mindblowing at the time. When you were at the arcade or the bowling alley, it was the game that the cool kids were playing, which, in 1994, meant the kids that were chain smoking and wearing Pantera and Misfits t-shirts. It was the edgy game, the game that parents didn’t want their kids to play. It was, if I may repeat myself, fucking cool.
And then we got the movie in 1995. I saw the original Mortal Kombat in a theater when I was eleven, which was pretty much the perfect age for it, and I loved it. However, I also knew that there were serious problems with it. There was a lot of awful, cringe-inducing dialogue, but that was forgivable. What wasn’t forgivable was the PG-13 rating, which stripped away almost all of the beloved gore. What’s the point of Mortal Kombat without the gore? As lame as that was, the film did a great job of creating and introducing the audience to the world of the games on the big screen and did so through the eyes of several of the game’s most popular characters. Despite its flaws, I think that the film would be held in much higher regard if it was R-rated (and it wasn’t hard for kids to get into R-rated movies back then anyway). Plus, it had one of the best soundtracks ever, back when studios would put bands like Napalm Death and Fear Factory on the soundtrack of major releases. I’m pretty sure that I still have the album around here somewhere.
I needed that excessively long preamble to establish a point of reference, so thanks for bearing with me. The 2021 Mortal Kombat is basically the opposite of the 1995 version. This time we get the R-rating that we wanted 26 years ago and the film delivers on the gore in a big way (it’s mostly CGI gore, but I’ll forgive that here since it doesn’t make much sense for me to criticize this for looking like a video game). On the downside, the script is a structural disaster that makes some highly questionable choices with its characters. There are great moments here, but they are wrapped within a whole lot of nonsense.
For starters, which character would you choose as the lead in a Mortal Kombat movie? Johnny Cage? Sonya? Well, how about fan-favorite Cole Young? Don’t remember Cole Young from the games? Well, that’s because they made him up for this film in one of the most baffling narrative choices that I’ve ever seen. With the franchise’s expansive roster of characters, why would you create a boring new character to anchor your movie? I understand that they wanted a character to act as an avatar for the audience entering this weird world, but there were already characters for this. Sonya could serve this purpose. Johnny Cage could serve this purpose and he isn’t even in the fucking movie. There was no reason for this and it kills the film’s momentum when so much of the plot depends on a character that the core audience couldn’t care less about.
The other characters are fairly hit-or-miss. Sonya and Jax are nothing special, but serviceable. Liu Kang is oddly relegated to a supporting character, which I’m actually fine with because I always thought that he’s boring as hell. Raiden is nowhere near as cool as Christopher Lambert’s version in the 1995 version and he does his usual movie schtick of saying he can’t get involved, even though he’s totally fucking involved in the games. Most of the villains are pretty forgettable, though Mileena is pretty damn cool. On the bright side, Sub Zero and Scorpion are badass and the film wisely plays up their rivalry (an element that was missing in the 90s movies). Sub Zero is a particular highlight, as the film does a great job of playing up his powers and gives him several great, gory moments.
One character deserves special attention, though, and that is Josh Lawson as Kano. This man is a goddam national treasure and single-handedly raised this film an entire letter grade. Everything this dude said was gold and I was laughing my ass off every time he opened his mouth. At one point, he simply said “the fuck?” and I was laughing so hard that I missed any lines that were said right after that. Every time I was losing interest in the movie, Kano would bring me right back to enjoying the movie again. Fuck everyone else, give us a Kano movie. I don’t care if it’s a sequel, a prequel, a spinoff, I don’t give a shit. I want more Kano.
At this point, you may be wondering about the plot. Well, so am I. It’s amazing that a film based on a game about a fighting tournament would forget to include a frigging fighting tournament, but here we are. This movie basically feels like a gritty version of Power Rangers with Raiden (in the Zordon role) having to assemble a team of rangers (Sonya, Liu Kang, Kano and, ugh, Cole Young) to fight off an inter-dimensional menace in the form of Shang Tsung (who is our Rita Repulsa for the sake of this comparison) and his crew of colorful henchmen. Thankfully our heroes don’t call on their zords for the climactic fight, but that is basically the plot structure here. Maybe I’m off-base, but I don’t watch Mortal Kombat to see a frigging Power Rangers episode for adults. I want a fighting tournament. The game is about a fighting tournament. How goddamn hard can that be? Take the script for Bloodsport, adjust as needed and, boom, Mortal fucking Kombat. This isn’t rocket surgery, for fuck’s sake.
If you’ve actually made it this far into this novel-length review, you may be wondering why I’m giving the movie a decent grade after bitching about it so much. Well, it’s because I had a good time with it. For all of its flaws, there are moments here that put a smile on my face and those mostly revolved around the gore (well, that and Kano). From the opening moments, the blood flowed and limbs were ripped off and I was finally seeing what I wanted to see back in the theater in 1995. Several fatalities from the games are recreated here and it is fucking glorious. The script does a terrible job of introducing Outworld, which looks like a cliffside in Arizona, but I forgot about that when Kung Lao used his hat as a buzzsaw or Jax crushed a guy’s head. Sure, that’s juvenile of me. I probably shouldn’t forgive major script issues just because I get to see childish video game violence. But I haven’t really changed much since I was that eleven-year-old kid in 1995 and my unfulfilled bloodlust from that day has finally been satisfied. That has to count for something.
All in all, I still think that the 1995 version is a marginally better film. The script is far more coherent and the characters were stronger (except Kano). However, the new version has all of the violence that was missing back then and Kano alone is worth the price of admission (have I mentioned how much I love Kano in this?). If you could combine the script from 1995 with the violence from 2021, you would have quite an amazing movie. As it is, this is a decent and fun movie for fans of the franchise and probably an incomprehensible mess for anyone that isn’t already a fan. And whether you prefer the 1995 or 2021 version, at least they are both better than Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat_(2021_film)#/media/File:Mortal_Kombat_(2021_film).png
