The end times are upon us, dear reader, and if you needed further proof, then simply look to the cinema listings, where a new, Karl Urban-fronted Mortal Kombat movie recently plopped into the toilet bowl. And before some misdirected drone turns my shrieking visage into TikTok fodder for the sadistic titillation of desensitised teenagers, I heartily volunteer for the forbidding task of reviewing every live action entry in this errant film series, all for the love of cinema and the merriment of my diminishing readership. Round 1 – fight!
The first Mortal Kombat movie came out in 1995, three years after the ground-breaking video game. It’s generally considered a solid start to the franchise, or at least vastly superior to 1994’s riotously awful Street Fighter adaptation, with which it is often and inevitably compared. In a way, however, it long struck me as more cringeworthy than the dog’s dinner served up by Van Damme and company, which at least crashed and burned with a bit of tongue-in-cheek razzmatazz, whereas Mortal Kombat mortifyingly attempted to shroud itself in a self-seriously edgy, cod-orientalist occultism.
Consider, if you will, the plot, which is shockingly formulaic, even by the standards of a Paul Anderson-skippered big screen video game adaptation. We open with the necessary, painfully transparent scene setting, whereby three heroic cookie cutters – Shaolin monk Liu Kang, washed up actor Johnny Cage, and special forces operative Sonya Blade – are allotted simple-minded motivations for participating in an intergalactic fighting tournament that will decide the fate of the universe.
As everyone knows, such tournaments are contractually obliged to take place on remote tropical islands, which our protagonists duly reach via a hammer horror junk-cum-floating Chinese restaurant owned by Shang Tsung, the tournament’s malevolent host and chief diversity officer. Once they arrive, what passes for the “backstory” is explicated at wearying length; if Tsung’s minions win the tournament, he will acquire planning permission over “Earthrealm”, so thunder god Raiden is banking on the three stooges to foil him. The concluding hour comprises a succession of ropey fight sequences pitting earth’s champions against computer-generated opponents that look like some inarticulate 16-year-old’s Information Technology coursework.
It’s fantastically stupid, obviously, but is it any good? Well, firstly, this review will not countenance the fanciful conceit that Mortal Kombat is a “credible action movie” warranting no comparison with Street Fighter, its raspberry of a cousin, because nothing could be further from the truth. Both ultimately entail an assortment of cosplaying, costume-wearing clowns beating each other up for poorly conceived reasons, and the simpletons in Mortal Kombat are no less cartoonish merely because they do so in a dimly lit temple.
Some of the lines are eye-gougingly idiotic (“to win your next match, use the element which brings life”, whispers Princess Kitana to Kang; “What?”, exasperatedly replies the thinking man’s Bruce Lee, like she’s just asked him the riddle of the sphinx. Water, you fucking imbecile, water, did you even finish secondary school?) The relationships between the characters are, for the most part, laughably unconvincing. Kang, Cage, and Blade form a wisecracking thick-as-thieves comedy trio within 25 seconds of meeting each other, while the burgeoning battle of wills between Raiden and Shang Tsung is more Merlin vs Madam Mim than Gandalf vs Saruman.
The individual performances are so uneven that I’m hard-pressed to arrive at a coherent judgement of them. Is Robin Shou sympathetic and centred, or made of plywood? Is Linden Ashby a loveable rogue with some amusing one liners, or an anaemic, bargain basement John Burton? Christopher Lambert is by turns commandingly enigmatic and get-behind-the-sofa levels of cringe, sometimes in the same scene, sometimes in the same line; while Cary Tagawa is soft-spokenly sinister one second, saucy pantomime villain the next.
This is Anderson’s fault, plainly, but perhaps the most signal failing within the context of a tournament fighting film is the bland, unimpactful, largely slow motion action sequences. It’s hard to believe that he got away with this mailed-in mincemeat, especially given that the accompanying backdrops look like they were constructed by the same cowboys responsible for the ghost train at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. “Outworld” in particular resembles a shoestring set from mid-90s gameshow The Crystal Maze, or perhaps Rotherham town centre.
And yet, despite the foregoing excoriation, Mortal Kombat remains an entertainingly over the top video game adaptation that, unlike its baleful follow up, never quite descends into brain-frying miasma. On balance, it just about avoids bursting its stitches through the performances, the brutal simplicity of the plot, the studied links to the original game, and the air of persistent hilarity. With that said, however, the final seconds see an appearance by dark emperor Shao Khan, who looks like something from the video board game Atmosfear. By this point at the very latest, the viewer is perfectly entitled to fear the worst for the sequel, and with good reason.
Rating: * * *