Mortal Kombat is yet another reboot/adaptation of the popular video game, and while fans may appreciate its faithfulness to the source material, everyone else will find it pretty disposable. Ultimately, the only reason for its existence appears to be to spawn a hopeful franchise.
The movie opens by letting us know that there’s an ancient tournament taking place, and a realm known as Outworld has been victorious in nine out of 10 match-ups. Their opponent, Earthrealm, is all that stands in their way of absolute victory.
There’s a trio of one MMA fighter and two Special Forces soldiers recruited to join the fight. The fighter is Cole Young (Lewis Tan), and the two soldiers are Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks). Together, they join a mysterious thunder god known as Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to battle against a dark warlock named Shang Tsung (Chin Han) and his second-in-command Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), who has the ability to freeze anyone or anything at will.
Joining the trio on their quest is an Australian mercenary named Kano (Josh Lawson), who provides comic relief and most of his one-liners work.
The fight scenes are very much hit-or-miss, but it does contain many intense and occasionally graphic moments that will satisfy hard-core fans, unlike the 1995 PG-13 watered-down version.
As I mentioned, this reboot of Mortal Kombat is obviously intended as the first of a new franchise. This movie does a better job than most video game adaptations, and I guess I shouldn’t expect anything great from Mortal Kombat, but the problem is that everything in the movie is either too little or too much.
We either get too many bloody martial arts scenes and not enough plot or scenes where we establish the characters, but it’s done in such a haphazard fashion that we’re not really invested except for maybe Kano due to his humor.
Fans of the game may come out mostly satisfied, but they’ll still find stuff to quibble about. As for everyone else going in blind, if you don’t already know who the characters are, you’re going to have to pay very close attention.
Grade: C
(Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and some crude references.)
