Mortal Kombat (2021)

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed by this.

I should clarify: I’ve never played any of the “Mortal Kombat” games – I’ve barely touched any fighting games at all – my disappointment here doesn’t even had to do with the regular pitfalls of videogame movies.
In fact, one of the few things I actually know about the “Mortal Kombat” game franchise is that the finishing moves for each fighter are notoriously graphic and gory, which only became more intense as the series grew along with more powerful gaming hardware, making those graphic details even more graphically detailed.

The movie opened in Feudal Japan with Hanzo (Hiroyuki Sanada) getting brutally murdered by Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) for reasons. The movie tried to explain it as Bi-Han committing murder on behalf of his boss, but Bi-Han’s interaction with Hanzo was far too personal to be anything other than some kind of vendetta under the façade of a job.

Then we saw Cade… Cale? Cody? Cyle? …Cole? (Lewis Tan), a promising young fighter who had apparently started throwing fights for the low, low cost of $200 cash in his pocket; an amount that certainly seems far too low to compensate for the recurring chance of brain damage.
Cole (Tan) was the first of many characters in this movie who’s name I just didn’t care about enough to remember. I spent most of the movie trying to remember what his name was, until someone called it out in a fight scene, only to promptly forget it again as soon as the scene changed.
And it wasn’t just him – I had that with every character, except Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), who’s name I only remembered because it’s a pretty cool name.

Turns out that Cole was one of Earthrealm’s chosen fighters – an unfortunate distinction as it meant that he was liable to be magically teleported to some other realm’s space arena to murder or be murdered; this fate indicated by a “birthmark” that was coincidentally the exact same shape as the dragon logo of the Mortal Kombat games.
Inconveniently, Savagerealm’s warriors had decided to break galactic law(?) and kill off Earthrealm’s warriors outside the arena, which was apparently against the rules established by the Old Gods, who very clearly didn’t give the tiniest of shits about someone breaking the rules they established.

And Cole, being the warrior of legend that he was, had a hidden power, because all of the chosen warriors had a chosen power. Some could throw fireballs, others could throw their saw-hats, or shoot laser beams from one eye, while another made his axes glow purple. One guy made his robot arms evolve through sheer power of will.
It made as much sense for me to watch as for you to read right now.
Of course, no one could activate these powers until they’d been revealed, so we were treated to approximately 30 minutes of characters taunting each other to coax out their powers.

Meanwhile, Evil Badguy Man – a character who’s name I not only don’t remember, but I’m not even sure anyone said in the movie, and thus I cannot find the actor’s name on IMDB – was looking for a way to wipe out the last of the Earthrealm warriors, so that Earthrealm would automatically forfeit the next Mortal Kombat tournament, which meant that the Savagerealm would win its 10th consecutive round against them and therefore gain complete control of Earthrealm.
There was no explanation given for why 10 victories in Kombat resulted in control being handed over, or how often those rounds happened.
Was this a 10-year timescale? 100 years? 1000? Who knows! Shame on you for asking.

Anyway: Evil Badguy Man wanted Bi-Han to go wipe out the last of the Earthrealm warriors, and when he asked for Bi-Han, he was promptly informed that Bi-Han had changed his name to Sub Zero.
Sure, he had ice powers, but he was also Chinese and spoke Chinese (Mandarin, maybe?), which means that the only reason the script gave him that new name was because Sub Zero is the name of one of the fighters from the Mortal Kombat games. That’s it. That’s as much of an explanation as I can give.
It’s only marginally more reasonable than Hanzo, who got reincarnated later with fire powers, and arbitrarily declared his new name to be Scorpion.
You know, after the arachnids that have absolutely nothing to do with fire.

Being a movie made after the fighting game, there were a lot of fighting scenes. And they were really bad.
Between the “John Wick” the “IP Man” series, I have incredibly high expectations for the choreography of combat scenes. In this movie, no shot during any fight lasted longer than approximately 2.5 second, which meant that as soon as someone threw a punch, the camera cut to another angle.
It was frustrating because it made it clear that the studio didn’t have a lot of faith in training the actors or stunt doubles to actually fight in any scene, and therefore just shot those scenes a bunch of times and snipped out the good bits from each one to stitch it all together.
At least there wasn’t the added annoyance of shakycam to go with.

Somewhere in there, Sub Zero managed to find Cole’s wife (Laura Brent) and daughter (Matilda Kimber) and threaten their lives, which dragged us into the final act, where Scorpion spontaneously reincarnated to finish his centuries-long revenge arc.
So they fought.
And Sub Zero died. Maybe.
Then Evil Badguy Man showed up again to gloat for some reason. His decision to appear then and there didn’t benefit any of his henchmen, especially as Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) promptly appeared too and told him to bugger off via his lightning powers.
This movie was painfully clear that it was the first movie of at least a duology, if not a trilogy.
The ending was so obvious about the hopeful existence of a sequel that it might have actually been more subtle if one of the characters broke the fourth wall to tell the audiences that a sequel was coming.

That’s it.
That was the movie.
100 minutes of runtime that was the origin story for about a dozen characters, all of whom had the development and depth of that last bit of toothpaste left in the tube that you can’t quite get out.
The fight scenes were poorly choreographed and shot, and when the concept of finishing moves drunkenly swerved its way onto set, they were unimpressive and underwhelming.
Sure, I saw one person get split down the middle by a saw-hat, but the camera didn’t even focus on the gore.
Of all movies that showed gore and didn’t need to, this movie unfathomably did the opposite. The entire franchise its built on is known for it’s graphically violent finishing moves, which this movie apparently looked at and got squeamish about, which is even more bonkers as it was given an “R” rating and released directly to HBOMax, so it’s not even like AT&T/WB had to worry about losing ticket sales if word got out that the movie would be gross-violent.

Kano (Josh Lawson) was the only interesting character in this movie: he was a foul-mouthed Australian bounty hunter, who learned his secret power, decided to be a badguy, and was then promptly killed with a garden gnome.

There will, inevitably, be another movie, because WB is desperate for their own cinematic universe that they can exploit as a money printing machine, but it won’t be this.
We’ll see the second movie release to HBOMax too, and then the announcement that #3 is in the works, and then it will be quietly killed off during production, as is only reasonable.

Oh, I almost forgot: the special effects and the soundtrack.
They were both terrible.

Despite everyone knowing the “Mortal Kombat” theme song – especially if you were in marching band or were the parent of the kid in marching band – they waited until the very final fight scene to play it once. They didn’t even get through the entire piece; just enough of it that you’d recognize it as the theme.
Surely, they had the musical rights to play it, so I have no idea why it wasn’t just played ad nauseum throughout the entire run time.

And then there was the CGI.
It was unacceptably bad.
I’ve commented on this before with other WB movies: they have the kinds of production budgets that would make entire small countries jealous, so I cannot understand why they arbitrarily decide to skimp out on the rendering farms.
There were far too many times when a body flew across the screen that was clearly a CGI golem that didn’t get enough time in the render oven.
It was a pathetic showing from a studio that could absolutely afford to do better.

It’s kinda sad watching WB compete so incompetently with Disney in an attempt at recreating Disney’s success with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
First WB tried with the DC movies – and failed – then they tried with the Harry Potter universe via the Magical Creatures spinoff – which is actively failing – and now they’ve turned to Mortal Kombat. It’s probably a pretty safe choice, as it’s a fighting game known for violent fight scenes and not for its storyline, so I’m sure they could take it in whatever direction they wanted, it’s just… not a series I’m invested in, and I wouldn’t have paid to see this in theaters even if theaters were open.

Download this for a flight, but don’t even use your couch time for it.