Movie Review: Mortal Kombat 2

Welcome back one and all to another new movie review, this time featuring Mortal Kombat 2.

Spoilers are of course to follow in the following paragraphs (duh), so proceed at your own risk!

Alright, to start out, let’s go through the plot. To put it plainly, the plot was incredibly thin, and pretty predictable. I’ll get more into this in a bit, but the story goes that the Outworld realm ruled by the tyrannical Shao Khan is seeking to conquer the other realms, and the way they do that is through winning ten Mortal Kombat tournaments in a row. The movie starts with Shao Khan winning the last tournament, which gave him reign over Adian? Adien? Adiena? I’m not really sure how to spell it, but long story short the Adian/Adien/Adiana realm is now under Shao Khan’s control, and now he has his sights set on earth realm. We then meet our heroes, some returning (Sonya, Cole, Jax, Raiden, etc.), some new (mainly Johnny Cage and Kitana), and as you’d expect they bring in Johnny, get him up to speed on the tournament, he refuses to fight, comes back, blah, blah, blah, becomes the hero, and saves the day. Along the way, Shao Khan steals Raiden’s power to become immortal, our heroes team up with Kitana and Scorpion to return Raiden’s powers, and the movie ends with Shao Khan dying, and Kitana ruling Adia/Adiena/whatever. There is also sequel bait at the end, as quite a few characters die, and Sonya gathers the remaining group to, as she puts it, “get their friends back”, or whatever that means, but the jury’s still out on if this franchise will get another installment (unlikely in my opinion).

Alright, with the plot out of the way, let’s get into my thoughts. To sum it up, I’m a bit torn on what to think of this movie. On the one hand, Mortal Kombat 2 doesn’t take itself too seriously, Karl Urban and the rest of the cast are very entertaining, the fight scenes are pretty good, and it hits the recognizable points of the game in a way that was fun and interesting to see on the big screen. Conversely, the movie is at least ten to twenty minutes too long, the “plot” if you could call it that is paper thin, and things got a bit boring toward the end.

I’m willing to forgive the paper-thin plot just because this is after all a movie based on a video game which was originally based on a fighting arcade game, but there’s no reason for this to be a bit boring or as long as it was.

I think the main problem here was that too much screentime was devoted to returning characters that were either pretty quickly killed off or written to the side. This mostly occurs with Cole Young, Jax, Raiden, and Scorpion, and all their scenes in particular felt unnecessary, since they all did pretty much nothing, and were only seemingly included because they were either in the previous installment or are notable game characters. The main attractions here are Johnny Cage, Sonya, Kano, and Kitana (who are all really great and fun), and I think the movie would have been better off shifting runtime away from the formerly mentioned returning characters, and using it to either build a stronger plot with our main characters or just to be cut altogether to save runtime.

Another gripe I have with Mortal Kombat 2 is the effects and CGI. A lot of the backgrounds felt entirely lifeless, and at multiple points the CGI looked incredibly bad or just felt clunky. I don’t really know how this happens in a movie like this, because the source material for how things should look is readily available, and I find it a bit farfetched to think that the studio didn’t give the CGI team enough time, seeing as this movie is coming out five years after the first.

Switching gears, a few things I think this movie deserves its roses for are the willingness to kill off notable characters (namely Jax and Cole Young). While I do think these characters and their scenes sucked up an unnecessary amount of screentime, I appreciate the willingness of any movie to kill of notable characters, and I think this took a bit of courage to do.

Also, I think Mortal Kombat 2 captures the spirit of the games/source material very well, and there are quite a few scenes, characters, set pieces, and more that translated cool and important elements of the game onto the big screen without being too fan service-y.

All in all though, Mortal Kombat 2 is a mixed bag. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, it delivers on what you’d expect and want from a movie based on the Mortal Kombat series, and its performances are very fun and enjoyable. However, it is too long, the CGI does not look amazing, and there’s not enough substance to make this plot an actually interesting story.

Because of this, I rated Mortal Kombat 2 as a 2 1/2 stars on Letterboxd, but I did give it a like because I think there are plenty of enjoyable moments, and enough to keep the audience mostly engaged.

Looking Ahead

Well there you have it folks, another movie reviewed, and another video game movie in the books.

While this wasn’t the best movie ever, it certainly wasn’t the worst video game movie or just movie for that matter, and I think there’s enough here to entertain most people.

Looking ahead, my review of The Sheep Detectives will come out on Wednesday, and next week I’ll be seeing and reviewing Obsession, In The Grey, and Is God Is.

Is God Is may be shelved (this is still TBD), but all will be reviewed and posted in due time, so there’s plenty more on the way from me!