Mark Reviews Movies: MORTAL KOMBAT (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 22, 2021

As video games have become as focused on storytelling as on gameplay, the medium has evolved, making the notion of cinematic adaptations of video games a bit more tenable (and, also, a bit more pointless, since so many games themselves are already telling stories in more "cinematic" ways). Mortal Kombat, though, feels like a regression, back to the time when filmmakers had to invent entire stories from games that barely possessed a plot. That makes sense: The game series that screenwriters Greg Russo and Dave Callaham are adapting here is all about bloody fighting and, from its inception back in 1992, about gruesome killings.

There was never much of a story to these games, save for the fights, justified by a premise involving a tournament between a variety of combatants, and some basic back stories to their assorted characters. That's all we get from this movie—the bloody fights and some occasional details about its extensive cast of characters. The paper-thin story is so meaningless that it's hardly an excuse for even these meager ambitions.

If the fights were entertaining and the characters were even somewhat interesting, we might not care about the plot, but Russo, Callaham, and director Simon McQuoid (making his feature debut) can't even be bothered to give us that little. The fights are lazily choreographed, choppily assembled, and repetitive. The characters are essentially defined and distinguished by three things: their names, their superpowers, and their varying levels of tough attitude. They're here to fight and occasionally spout the same exposition, just in case we may somehow have forgotten that there are bad guys to defeat and a world to save.

There's also a distinct issue with tone that nobody involved seems to recognize. The opening sequence, a kind of self-contained fight between two ninjas in Japan during the 1600s, is the movie's best, because it treats this material with some seemingly sound severity. Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) have a brutal brawl, the former with a garden trowel left behind by his murdered wife and the latter with his ability to summon ice.

At the end of it, the elder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), with glowing white eyes, appears from a bolt of lightning, and we're reminded that, yes, this is severely silly stuff. A belated text prologue—explaining the rules of a tournament between Earthrealm and Outworld, an evil villain's desire to conquer the former world, and something about a prophecy—only solidifies how ridiculous and ludicrously slight the rest of the plot will be.

McQuoid, though, definitely doesn't realize this fact and proceeds with the same seriousness as that isolated prologue. We meet Cole Young (Lewis Tan), an up-and-coming martial artist, who is recruited by Jax (Mehcad Brooks).

The fighter could help in the battle for Earthrealm against Outworlder Shang Tsung (Chin Han) and his band of demonic brawlers, who are trying to kill their opponents before the official tournament begins. Cole later meets Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Kano (Josh Lawson), before meeting Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kung Lao (Max Huang), and Raiden—all of whom explain the same plot details that have been established by every character before them.

It's all about the fights, training among themselves, to show off or learn their superpowers, or battling against Shang Tsung's warriors—one with a black patch around her mouth, one wearing a metal suit, and another with wings. There's a pair of computer-generated foes, an invisible lizard with acid saliva and a four-armed monstrosity. Both of them look as if they were rendered back in the early 2000s and saved on a hard drive, waiting until this movie was made.

What, really, can be said of these fights? They're gory, yes, especially in re-creating the game series' trademarked "fatalities," and they also feel like the same thing over and over again—lots of punching, some visual effects of laser beams and fireballs, and a particularly silly amount of unnecessary twirling through the air. As the visual effects become more frequent, these fights lose all sense of grounding (not that there was much to begin with, considering the useless story and the amount of damage these fighters survive—even death, apparently, if the sequel-establishing finale, complete with "extra lives" for some characters, is any sign). McQuoid's quick-cutting style means the brawls aren't even entertaining as a showcase for the combatants' skills.

Of course, this isn't the first time someone tried to make a movie based on these games, but time and failure haven't taught the makers of Mortal Kombat any lessons. At this point, the main lesson seems to be to stop trying to make a movie from this material.

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