In a spectacular display of blood, guts, and effects-heavy martial arts battles, this new take on the over-the-top story of the Mortal Kombat fighting games perhaps bites off a little more than it can chew by attempting what is essentially an origin story and an Avengers-esque superhero team-up all in one.
The only exception to this is Scorpion who gets an incredibly effective prologue and Hiroyuki Sanada’s performance really makes you feel for his pain. It’s especially evident with Cole Young who feels like a passive protagonist with a cliche ‘chosen one’ backstory that isn’t helped by Lewis Tan’s wooden performance to go with it. This same dumbing down also applies to the characters, who either have no backstory or incredibly derivative ones. It also makes the world itself feel smaller than it should, especially because we spend a vast majority of the film in a generic cave in the middle of nowhere and the rest of it in alleys and deserted homes. But what we do get is surprisingly simplified and dumbed down to the point that it creates apathy within the audience with the basic ‘bad people are coming to take over Earth’ storyline.Īnd whatever exposition we do get is not handled elegantly as characters just spew off chunks of it in stilted dialogue scenes. Mortal Kombat has always been known to have a complicated lore and mythology, so no one expected the filmmakers to literally translate that here.
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Where the movie doesn’t entirely land is the story and the characters. It’s also a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously all the time, thanks to the addition of Kano as the foul-mouthed wisecracker who is aware of the absurdity of all of this and makes the proceedings a lot more fun to witness. The movie also does a solid job at visualising the crazier visual aspects of the game whether it comes to the Netherrealm or Sub-Zero’s icy trickeries, by either embracing the crazy or grounding them in a way that we can relate to in our real world. It’s a little disappointing that a lot of the best parts are in the red band trailer, though. These unexpected moments are the best part of the adaptation by far and worth the price of admission alone if you care for the source material. The fatalities here are incredibly brutal and show some very imaginative fatalities in graphic detail. It won’t be an understatement to say that Mortal Kombat might be the most shockingly gory studio blockbuster in a long, long time. Director Simon McQuoid did a fantastic job staging these fight sequences with every bit of excitement they deserve, but what’s truly shocking is just how much like the games it is. Let’s start with the good, and that truly is the iconic fight sequences gamers know and love from the series.
It’s up to our heroes to find their inner powers before it’s too late, and for Cole Young it may all be connected to his lineage. As he teams up with Sonya Blade, Kano, Liu Kang, Kung Lao and Raiden to learn the skills necessary to defeat their opponents, the roster of fighters realise that their roster of otherworldly opponents led by Shang Tsung and Sub-Zero will break the rules of the tournament to conquer Earth once and for all. After a visit from a fighter named Jax, he is told that what he thought was a birthmark is actually a branding that is only given to a few people chosen as fighters who have to defend Earth from invading forces of the realm of Outworld in a once in a generation championship known as Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat follows a young and struggling boxer named Cole Young who has always had a birthmark he never thought too much of.
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You consider plot and character development mostly as an afterthought and excel at the only thing gamers love about the series - gory, inventive fatalities. After a 1995 adaptation that delivered lukewarm results and its terrible sequel that killed the franchise, 2021’s Mortal Kombat will make the fans of the long-running video game series happy because it turns out the best way to adapt a Mortal Kombat game is to … treat it like a Mortal Kombat game. Video-game adaptations are notoriously hard to pull off, but the task becomes significantly harder when the source material is an arcade fighting game with the plot and characters there just as an excuse to make people fight.